Breakthrough Technology for Rapid Sepsis Diagnosis Developed in Taiwan

[Media Today / Neach-aithris Chen Yunde]About 160,000 people in Taiwan are infected with sepsis every year Even with the advanced medical technology, sepsis patients still face the problem of not being able to quickly and accurately find out where the disease came in the early stages of. Most of them rely on the expertise of doctors to find a diagnosis. Professor Zhang Guoen from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of National Chung Cheng University and Professor Zhou Lijun from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry developed the “Microfluidic Rapid Screening Platform for Sepsis”. The detection sensitivity breaks the global record and the detection time is shortened from the original 15 minutes to 8 minutes, making the diagnosis of sepsis faster and more accurate, which is helpful for early detection and treatment.

Sepsis is one of the main causes of death in China over the years, it is a symptom of systemic inflammation caused by bacteria, viruses, etc. Zhang Guoen said that the golden treatment time for sepsis is only six hours from the time the patient gets the infection to the time when the right medicine is prescribed, if the patient’s survival rate drops to less than 50% Zhang Guoen said: “In the early stage of the disease, fast and accurate test methods that run against time are especially important. This will help doctors to provide effective medicines and treatment.”

At present, sepsis clinical trials mainly rely on ELISA test technology, which must be operated by professionals in the medical laboratory department, and which are equipped with medium and large-scale equipment to perform the process test, and various sepsis tests are performed. Zhang Guoen said: “The sensitivity of this rapid screening biosensor can be said to be increased more than 1,000 times.” He said that the technology developed by the National Chung Cheng University team can detect with a detection limit of 0.871 fg / mL in a short time Procalcitonin biomarker breaks through the current bottle of sepsis test.

In addition to higher speed, the protein biomedical detection chip of the optical microfluidic sepsis rapid screening platform costs less than US $ 1, and the rapid detection system consists of optical components thin, short, low-priced. Zhang Guoen explained that sepsis screening in the future will not require large, bulky and expensive test instruments; the new instrument is as big as a printer, has the advantages of portability and mass production, and can even be placed in health and public clinics; areas after popularity Within the hospital, screening can be done without going to a large hospital, which is very convenient and fast, and also greatly reduces the cost of treatment and testing for sepsis patients.

This protein biomedical detection chip can be applied to other diseases, such as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, etc., greatly contributing to the health and well-being of mankind around the world. The current results were published in the journal “Nano Letters” of the American Chemical Society and were selected as the cover of the journal. This journal is a flagship high-impact journal in the field of nanotechnology, with an Impact Factor of over 10 for many years. Only a few papers in Taiwan are successfully published every year. It is not easy to publish the research results of National Chung Cheng University and be selected as a journal cover.

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