At the University of Toledo in Ohio scientists are working on a low cost and portable blood testing surface plasmon sensor. Blood tests are an important diagnostic toll and they can be expensive, time consuming and use difficult to transport equipment.
The details were described in a paper published in the September 1 issue of the Biomedical Optics Express. The paper was titled - Development of a highly specific amine-terminated aptamer functionalized surface plasmon resonance biosensor for selective blood protein detection.
The team of researcher is now working on an inexpensive and portable technique which can detect specific proteins in the human blood sample quickly and accurately. The technique will be able to help early detection in cancer, drug research, environmental monitoring and monitoring diabetes.
One of the authors of the paper, Brent D. Cameron with the department of bioengineering at the University of Toledo said that the system's ability to monitor these conditions enables quantifying the amount of the target protein that is present, even at very low concentrations.
He said that the detection and measurement of specific blood proteins can have a huge impact on numerous applications in medical diagnostic sensing. This method has the potential to provide similar functionality of large and costly clinical instrumentation currently used to identify and quantify blood proteins for a fraction of current costs he added.
The technology is still about three to five years away from commercial use in medical diagnosis as per Cameron. The time frame being dependant on the target application area as they go for FDA procedures and filings.
Paper: "Development of a highly specific amine-terminated aptamer functionalized surface plasmon resonance biosensor for selective blood protein detection," Biomedical Optics Express, Volume 2, Issue 9, pp. 2731-2740.