There’s a portable blood-testing machine, designed by US-based PointCare, which can give a print-out detailing a patient’s immune status in 10 minutes. The machine was designed for use in third-world or developing world clinics such as the one in Uganda which is described in this BBC story.
One of the problems doctors and medical staff had with equipment for testing HIV patients’ immune system was that the chemicals used as reagents in the testing process were too easily perishable in the high heat common in a lot of countries. PointCare soved the problem this way (from the BBC article):
Dr Hansen [from PointCare] invented a test that uses chemical reagent that can be freeze-dried and stored in temperatures of over 40C.
CD4 screening tests use antibodies – molecular tags that recognise and latch onto a chemical marker on the surface of the cell. By attaching to the cells, they act as flags distinguishing CD4 cells from other white blood cells.
But these antibodies need to be “labelled”, so they can be detected by a machine.
Traditionally, antibodies are labelled using fluorescent markers, but these fluorescent chemicals perish if they are not kept refrigerated. So they’re useless for a medical team operating from a temporary clinic in the heat of an African summer.
Dr Hansen developed a new label. “We use colloidal gold,” explains Dr Krauledat [community physician]. “It’s true nanotechnology – extremely tiny gold particles attached to the anti-CD4 antibody.”
Do go and read the full story because there’s more to it than I’ve included. Meanwhile I had another look at those lithography stories (SFU’s new maskwriting facilities and RAPID) that I was posting about last week. While the new RAPID technique may make the use of ultra-violet light obsolete, they still haven’t approached the nanoscale. The measurement mentioned is “… 2500 times smaller than a human hair” [more here]. The measurement usually mentioned when discussing the nanoscale is between 1/100,000 ro 1/60,000 (nobody seems to agree on the exact measurement, you can check here) of the width of a human hair equals 1 nanometre. Weirdly, the Simon Fraser University (SFU) release notes that the new facilities will be able to create structures “… under 20 nanometres about 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair” [more here]. If I’m doing the math correctly, wouldn’t that be between 1/50,0000 and 1/30,000 of the human hair? I know it’s a little fussy but once a technical writer, always a technical writer and that kind of detail can make a big difference.
Researchers led by Dr. Hanadi Sleiman and Dr. Gonzalo Cosa at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) have developed a new way to manufacture nanotubes using DNA, in short they are DNA nanotubes. The longer story is here and the shorter story is here.