Tag Archives: Luke P. Lee

Diagnosing diseases by using nanomembranes to isolate biomarkers in tears

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How are they planning to make people cry on command or use a swab on your eyeball? In general, I like the idea of using tears instead of other bodily secretions but it’s the practicalities that have me questioning how this kind of diagnostic test could be implemented. In any event, here’s more from a July 20, 2022 news item on phys.org,

Going to the doctor might make you want to cry, and according to a new study, doctors could someday put those tears to good use. In ACS Nano, researchers report a nanomembrane system that harvests and purifies tiny blobs called exosomes from tears, allowing researchers to quickly analyze them for disease biomarkers. Dubbed iTEARS, the platform could enable more efficient and less invasive molecular diagnoses for many diseases and conditions, without relying solely on symptoms.

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A July 20, 2022 American Chemical Society (ACS) news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains the work in more detail,

Diagnosing diseases often hinges on assessing a patient’s symptoms, which can be unobservable at early stages, or unreliably reported. Identifying molecular clues in samples from patients, such as specific proteins or genes from vesicular structures called exosomes, could improve the accuracy of diagnoses. However, current methods for isolating exosomes from these samples require long, complicated processing steps or large sample volumes. Tears are well-suited for sample collection because the fluid can be collected quickly and non-invasively, though only tiny amounts can be harvested at a time. So, Luke Lee, Fei Liu and colleagues wondered if a nanomembrane system, which they originally developed for isolating exosomes from urine and plasma, could allow them to quickly obtain these vesicles from tears and then analyze them for disease biomarkers.

The team modified their original system to handle the low volume of tears. The new system, called “Incorporated Tear Exosomes Analysis via Rapid-isolation System” (iTEARS), separated out exosomes in just 5 minutes by filtering tear solutions over nanoporous membranes with an oscillating pressure flow to reduce clogging. Proteins from the exosomes could be tagged with fluorescent probes while they were still on the device and then transferred to other instruments for further analysis. Nucleic acids were also extracted from the exosomes and analyzed. The researchers successfully distinguished between healthy controls and patients with various types of dry eye disease based on a proteomic assessment of extracted proteins. Similarly, iTEARS enabled researchers to observe differences in microRNAs between patients with diabetic retinopathy and those that didn’t have the eye condition, suggesting that the system could help track disease progression. The team says that this work could lead to a more sensitive, faster and less invasive molecular diagnosis of various diseases — using only tears.

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Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Discovering the Secret of Diseases by Incorporated Tear Exosomes Analysis via Rapid-Isolation System: iTEARS by Liang Hu, Ting Zhang, Huixiang Ma, Youjin Pan, Siyao Wang, Xiaoling Liu, Xiaodan Dai, Yuyang Zheng, Luke P. Lee, and Fei Liu. ACS Nano 2022, XXXX, XXX, XXX-XXX DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.2c02531 Publication Date:July 20, 2022 © 2022 American Chemical Society

This paper appears to be open access.

More bimetallic nanoparticles

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Two days ago, I noted that I’d never encountered bimetallic nanoparticles before reading about the ‘Christmas decorations’ created by a Mexico/US research team (my Dec. 6, 2010 posting). Live and learn. Here’s another bimetallic (gold and silver this time too) news item on Nanowerk,

Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. (“Shrink”), an innovative nanotechnology company developing products and licensing opportunities in the solar energy industry, medical diagnostics and sensors and biotechnology research and development tools businesses, announced today that Shrink’s MetalFluor™ technology was studied, reported on and made the front cover of the November issue of Applied Physics Letters (“Bimetallic nanopetals for thousand-fold fluorescence enhancements”). [the article is behind a paywall]

I was most interested to note that at least one of the authors is a researcher associated with the company that issued the news release trumpeting the article in Applied Physics Letters. From the news item on Nanowerk,

The Company’s technology and the work being performed by Dr. Michelle Khine, our scientific founder, continues to gain high praise from leading academic journals. [emphases mine] The studies relate to potential commercial applications of this technology. Of note, the article states, “Because we have a range of nanostructure and nanogap sizes, we can ensure that we can achieve huge fluorescent enhancements on our substrate. These advantages show great potential for low-cost biomedical sensing at single molecular levels at physiological concentrations.” The Company believes that this article is further evidence that certain medical diagnostics tests, a multi-billion dollar annual industry in the United States alone, can provide physicians, patients and other medical professionals with better results using lower quantities of specimens using MetalFluor™ technologies.

Here’s more about possible uses for the technology cited in the article in Applied Physics Letters (citation: Bimetallic nanopetals for thousand-fold fluorescence enhancements by Chi-Cheng Fu1, Giulia Ossato, Maureen Long, Michelle A. Digman, Ajay Gopinathan, Luke P. Lee, Enrico Gratton, and Michelle Khine in vol. 97, issue no. 20, Nov. 15, 2010),

Our method can be easily integrated with microfluidic devices to combine with high throughput lab-on-chip techniques. Importantly, because of–not in spite of–the “variability” in our substrate, we do not need to choose an esoteric dye such that it would match our plasmon resonance. Because we have a range of nanostructure and nanogap sizes, we can ensure that we can achieve huge fluorescence enhancements on our substrate. These advantages show great potential for low-cost biomedical sensing at single molecular levels at physiological concentrations.

The company Khine founded is very interesting from an organizational perspective (the news item on Nanowerk),

Shrink is a first of its kind FIGA™ organization. FIGA companies bring together diverse contributions from leaders in the worlds of finance, industry, government and academia. [emphases mine] Shrink’s solutions, including its diverse polymer substrates, nano-devices and biotech research tools, among others, are designed to be ultra-functional and mechanically superior in the solar energy, environmental detection, stem cell and biotechnology markets. The Company’s products are based on a pre-stressed plastic called NanoShrink™, and on a patent-pending manufacturing process called the ShrinkChip Manufacturing Solution™. Shrink’s unique materials and manufacturing solution represents a new paradigm in the rapid design, low-cost fabrication and manufacture of nano-scale devices for numerous significant markets.

I can’t make much of this academic/business hybrid but I am intrigued and will watch its progress with some interest. You can visit the Shrink Nanotechnologies website here.