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Chip to analyse health of white blood cells NTU |
Nanyang Technological University
(NTU) researchers have developed a lab-on-a-chip system that is capable of
identifying a person's immune system from just a drop of blood within a few
minutes.
Created by Assistant Professor Hou
Han Wei and Assistant Professor Holden Li from the School of Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering, their invention, if successful in the lab and clinical
assessments, could be turned into a portable device suitable for family clinics
and polyclinics.
The team also believes that in future
it will help doctors to quickly gain insight into someone's immune system and
spot early signs of inflammation as well as infection that could signal the
need for further in-depth tests. It is believed that this device can potentially
be an additional screening tool for doctors to use for early detection of heart
diseases.
Asst Prof Hou, who is also a faculty
member at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at NTU, said that this chip
detects electrical differences between a healthy and unhealthy white blood
cell. Abnormal white blood cells have been reported as an early biomarker for
increased risk of cardiovascular diseases and also suggests an ongoing
inflammation.
It was also revealed that by using
tiny channels, this chip first separates blood cells by size into the different
outlets and then those isolated while cells are run through a special channel
where the electrical impedance is measured for each cell at a very high speed.
The electrical impedance of an
abnormal cell is usually higher than the impedance of a healthy cell. It should
be noted that white blood cells from a significant part of the body's immune
system and a key type known as neutrophils are the first line of defence when
infection or inflammation attacks a body.
As per Asst Prof Hou, this chip can
isolate "thousands of white blood cells from a single drop of blood and,
within minutes, tell if these cells are electrically different from normal,
which would be an indicator of whether there is a health issue to be further
investigated."
This process doesn't use any chemical
biomarkers or antibodies, "which makes the assay cheap, easy to use, and
that we can do further analysis on the same white blood cells we have already
run through the chip," he said.
It can be expected that this new
device could also be very useful for the study of NETosis, which is a newly
discovered defence mechanism in the field of immunology.
In addition, NETosis expert,
Assistant Professor Christine Wong, from NTU's Lee Kong Chian School of
Medicine, said that this chip "may enable rapid and non-biased NETosis
experiments and quantification, which will be especially useful for drug
screening ex-vivo."
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