HIV diagnostics could be as easy as a blood sugar test, if a new biochip technology created by University of Illinois researchers can be affordably mass-produced.
As a PhD student at University of Illinois in Urbana, nanotechnology engineer Nicholas Watkins developed a chip using electrical sensing to measure the CD4 – or “helper T” – white blood cells that decline in people infected with HIV. Now a team from the university and Daktari Diagnostics believe they’ve proved the technology as a potential alternative to the laborious and mostly immobile HIV diagnostic standard, flow cytometry.
“By providing accurate cell counts in less than 20 minutes from samples obtained from one drop of whole blood, this approach has the potential to be realized as a handheld, battery-powered instrument that would deliver simple HIV diagnostics to patients anywhere in the world, regardless of geography or socioeconomic status,” Watkins and the research team wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
With a 10-microliter sample of blood, the five-chip microfluidic biochip chemically breaks down red blood cells while preserving white blood cells, then counts CD4 white blood cells, which are widely used to gauge the onset of AIDS and to determine when to start antiretroviral therapy.
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The device can also detect related CD8 white blood cells, which can offer a more complete picture of how a person’s immune system is dealing with an HIV infection, according to the study.
Testing 18 healthy volunteers and 32 patients with HIV, the team compared the device to flow cytometry, the standard HIV diagnostic process developed in the 1950s that uses light waves to count, sort and detect cells.
They found the microfluidic biochip works just as well as flow cytometry; both use the same “Coulter” cell-counting principle. But since the biochip doesn’t use optics or require a central lab, it could “be realized as a battery-powered, handheld unit that analyzes finger prick blood samples via one-time-use, disposable biochips,” the team wrote.
Of the 33 million people infected with HIV around the world, the World Health Organization estimates that 7.5 million are eligible for treatment but are not aware of their C4 counts.
One of the team's goals is to have the technology available at the point of care or at home – without the need for trained personnel.
Two of the seven researchers on the team have financial stakes in Daktari Diagnostics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company founded in 2008 that is trying to commercialize a version of the technology.
Daktari has filed for a joint provisional patent on the technology along with the University of Illinois, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the study in Science Translational Medicine.
“We are still a couple of years away from commercialization as we need to work on more HIV-infected patient data, especially with low CD4 T cell counts,” said University of Illinois at Urbana engineering professor Rashid Bashir, a member of the team who has a stake in Daktari and the PhD advisor to Watkins, who developed the technology initially.
Bashir also told mHealth News that the technology “has many other applications where blood cells need to be counted at point of care from a finger prick.”
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