Tag Archives: Richard Gaster

Handheld diagnostic tool: nanoLAB

There’s a lot more action on the ‘handheld diagnostic equipment and abolish invasive testing’ front than I realized. (In my  Feb. 15, 2011 posting I highlighted the UK’s Argento [physical device and diagnostic tests for athletes] and PROOF [a Canadian group working 0n some new diagnostic tests for kidney patients and others].)

It turns out there’s another device, this one, to be found in the US, is called nanoLAB. From the Feb. 22, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

In 2009, Stanford University faculty member Shan Wang and doctoral students Richard Gaster and Drew Hall demonstrated that they could use the same ultrasensitive magnetic sensors that form the basis of today’s compact, high-capacity disk drives in combination with mass-produced magnetic nanotags to detect small amounts of cancer-associated proteins (click here for earlier story).

Now, in a paper published in the journal Lab on a Chip (“nanoLAB: An ultraportable, handheld diagnostic laboratory for global health”), the three scientists show how they shrunk this technology to create a handheld disease-detection device that any individual should be able to use at home to detect illness and even monitor the effectiveness of anticancer therapy.

In my Feb. 15 posting I wondered about how the samples were actually conveyed to the device. I now know how nanoLab does it, presumably Argento uses a similar approach,

The device, which the researchers have named the nanoLAB, consists of a disposable “stick” that resembles a home pregnancy test, and a handheld magnetic reader that analyzes a patient’s urine, blood, or saliva for the presence of specific disease-associated proteins. In its current design, the nanoLAB can provide simultaneous yes-no answers for up to eight different disease-associated proteins. The handheld sensor unit costs less than $200 to produce, while the sticks capable of making eight measurements cost less than $3.50 each, and could drop to under $1 apiece with improvements already in the works. …

To conduct a test using the nanoLab, a person would add a drop of biological sample – urine or blood, for example – on the stick. They would then add the contents of two premeasured vials to the stick and then wait 15 minutes for results to appear in the form of a lit LED light on the sensor unit.

It’s not quite Star Trek yet but we’re getting there.