Currently, many medical conditions and diseases, such as heart failure, are diagnosed using blood tests that look for a single biomarker (such as a protein or other small molecule). A new promising method, developed by scientists from Imperial College London in collaboration with Oxford Nanopore Technologies, can analyze dozens of biomarkers simultaneously. This allows clinicians to gather more information about a patient’s disease, the university said a press release.
Scientists are developing a test that can simultaneously analyze more than 40 different biomarkers, enabling a more comprehensive approach to disease diagnosis. This adaptable method, which requires only a small blood sample, not only provides rapid and cost-effective detection of heart failure, but also shows promise for detecting other diseases
Detection of heart failure
For example, current tests for heart failure look at a number of common proteins. The new method was also able to detect 40 different types of miRNA molecules. The method can simultaneously examine proteins, small molecules such as neurotransmitters and miRNA from the same clinical sample, providing comprehensive data.
Co-author Caroline Koch, from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial, said: “There are many different ways you can develop heart failure, but our test hopefully provides a cheap and quick way to find out, and can help find treatment options. This is possible with just one milliliter of blood. It is also a highly adaptable method, so the test can also be used to detect the hallmarks of diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.”
Smartwatches can predict higher risk of heart failure
Wearable devices such as smartwatches could be used to increase the risk of developing heart failure and irregular heart rhythms later in life… Continued
DNA-barcodes
The test works by mixing the blood sample with so-called DNA ‘barcodes’. Once the sample and barcodes are mixed, the resulting solution is injected into an inexpensive handheld device.
The device contains a flow cell with an array of very small holes – which can read the electrical signature of any DNA barcode that passes through it. The complex electrical signal produced by the device is interpreted by an algorithm that can identify the type and concentration of each biomarker.
Future perspective
The team is now working with clinical samples from patients with heart failure to validate the results. The method can be useful for speeding up diagnosis in two ways: in addition to measuring more biomarkers at the same time, it can also help find new biomarkers. Currently, only a handful of biomarkers have been validated for diagnosing heart disease, but by measuring 40 interesting miRNA types simultaneously, the team was also able to see which of these are relevant and could be validated with more tests.
2023-09-26 09:45:38
#revolution #medical #diagnoses #Test #analyzes #dozens #biomarkers #simultaneously
