Fast, effective, affordable, portable… Can new technologies tick all these boxes in a single test? Nanopore technology and DNA origami allow Paolo Actis and colleagues to measure one biomarker at a time — and the tech is portable, meaning it can be used anywhere. Suitable for anything from infectious disease to cancer detection, could this new approach to biomarker testing enable earlier and more affordable diagnosis?
Fast, effective, and affordable: an ideal triumvirate of characteristics for a diagnostic test. As a community of technologists, my peers and I have been working on rapid, low-cost biomarker disease detection for many years.
Of course, the COVID pandemic has brought the issue into the limelight — but there are many other diseases and use cases that make this technology valuable. For instance, we can glean a great deal of valuable information for diagnosing or monitoring cancer via a blood test to measure the concentration of circulating biomarkers. In many cases, the sooner you detect the presence of cancer biomarkers in blood, the higher the chance of survival and the more conservative the treatment options.
Once our test is ready for use, I believe it will change the lives of both patients and practitioners. Our goal is to empower patients to monitor their own health, reducing the number of hospitalizations without placing an additional burden on pathology labs. For instance, nurses who work with cystic fibrosis patients often travel miles to their homes just to take a blood sample for CRP testing an early marker of inflammation that can signal a need for medical intervention.
Why put nurses through hours of driving, laboratory medicine professionals through hours of work, and patients through days of waiting for a single result? I think point-of-care testing has incredible benefits to offer pathologists, patients, and health services as a whole.
Scientists all over the world have been trying to use DNA structures as protein carriers because the former is much easier to detect than the latter — we just had the good fortune of finding a way to make it work. We use nanopore technology to measure one biomarker at a time.
Essentially, we run an electrical current across tiny holes nanopores and measure changes in the current as the biomarker of interest passes through. At the moment, the technology measures nucleic acids accurately — but, in the future, we want to expand the analysis to proteins as well.
That will be a game-changer. That will then guide the doctor on whether to order more in-depth testing. Of course, point-of-care protein testing is not easy.
We build a structure that looks like a picture frame in the center of which we can capture a protein biomarker. Capturing that protein significantly changes the electrical signal across the DNA origami frame — allowing us to measure the protein level in a sample. Early detection difficulties In the research stage, biomarker detection technologies often perform well — but, when it comes to translating them from a controlled laboratory to a real-world environment, complications arise.
And we know the same may be true of our technology; it is a new approach, so we are trying to partner with hospitals and companies who can test it in a clinical setting. Traditionally, validating a medical technology takes years — often a decade or more.
When we provide clinical information, we need to have complete confidence in its accuracy — and that means carefully evaluating, standardizing, and controlling our tests, and ensuring that they are within acceptable margins of error. Imagine the miniaturization — and the power — of a smartphone applied to a biomarker testing tool. Because we can create a tiny device with integrated wireless connectivity and data analysis, we can turn a time-consuming laboratory procedure into a point-of-care test.
Finally, we measure biomarkers at the single-molecule level — one protein at a time — and build a signal by counting those proteins. Unlike a test that requires millions or trillions of individual proteins, this approach has the advantage of high sensitivity. From concept to reality To measure a specific protein, we start with a blood sample and pre-processing — at a minimum, to isolate a plasma sample. Reviews longer than characters are proven to generate a greater number of conversions.
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