Researchers at the University of Utah have been able to replicate technology commonly reserved for hard drives to test for infectious diseases; using the principle of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), which states that the electrical resistance of a particle will change when an external magnetic field is applied.
Using this technology, small samples of blood, urine, or saliva can be injected into a credit card sized device and infectious diseases have the potentional to be detected. This technology could further lead to increased point-of-care diagnostics with testing times on the order of minutes compared to hours.
Preliminary prototypes have shown that the technology is sensitive enough to detect 800 microscopic particles in a given sample. However researchers Marc Porter and Michael Granger believe with further modification single particles have the potential to be detected.
More can be found in the release here.
Early this year I had the chance to attend an entreprenurial seminar by George Whitesides at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He provided some very interesting advice to the startup entrepreneur (such as myself oneday). Included in this was a couple of homey words of advice, including making sure that each device you create “Solves a Problem”. I can not underestimate the importance of this. As this website continues to showcase inventions and innovative solutions, we have to ensure that we are solving a problem and displaying products that are going to become useful.
Another piece of advice that he gave was “Make simplicity an intimate business policy.” He has done exactly this with the creation of Paper Diagnostics. By combining microfluidics and one of the world most plentiful commodities–paper–Whitesides group has developed a method to test for infectious diseases using a single drop of blood or urine. When the sample is introduced microfluidics takes over and the sample is mixed with reagents which generates visable reactions. The results are then compared with a reference and a diagnosis is administered.