Integral diagnostics: everything about your health by a drop of blood in 10 minutes

Integrated Diagnostics, a company recently established in Seattle (Australia), plans to spend $30 million on the development and marketing of inexpensive microfluidic chips for simultaneous analysis of thousands of blood proteins that provide a detailed picture of the health of the body.

The technologies used by the company have been developed over the past 9 years by researchers at the University of California (Los Angeles, USA) and the Institute of Systems Biology (Seattle). The company's specialists hope to complete work on test systems within the next three years, allowing for early diagnosis of many diseases using a single drop of blood within a few minutes.

The basis of modern diagnostic tests is the identification of one marker of the disease, for example, prostate-specific antigen (PSA), which is a prognostic factor of prostate cancer. However, such tests are not always reliable. The approach proposed by Integrated Diagnostics is based on the principles of systems biology and takes into account information about a huge number of different biomarkers associated with the health of the body and various diseases. According to Leroy Hood, one of the founders of the company and president of the Institute of Systems Biology, any disease is the result of a malfunction of a system consisting of many genes and proteins. Therefore, the diagnosis should be comprehensive, and not based on the study of a single gene or protein.

This approach will allow not only to diagnose diseases such as cancer at earlier stages, but also to determine the degree of malignancy of the tumor and the stage of disease progression, as well as to select the drugs that are most effective in each case.

To date, the systematic approach has demonstrated excellent results only in laboratories. Its transfer to clinical practice is complicated by the high cost and complexity of complex multiparametric tests. Modern methods for determining blood proteins require a lot of time and financial costs. For example, a PSA test costs about $ 40, and the cost of determining the level of other blood proteins can reach $500 per test. Integrated Diagnostics claims that the introduction of the technology they use can reduce the cost of such analyses by hundreds of times.

The company's specialists are working on an inexpensive microfluidic chip that allows for 10 minutes to analyze the marker proteins contained in a drop of blood. The chip was developed by Hood together with James Heath, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, who is also a co-founder of Integrated Diagnostics. The chip's operation is based on a technology licensed by the company, the developer of which is also Professor Heath: protein fragments are used in the chip to bind blood proteins. Such binding agents are more stable and cheaper to produce than the antibodies traditionally used in such tests.

The company has also licensed an extensive database of organ-specific proteins collected by researchers at the Institute of Systems Biology. The advantage of the organ–specific approach is that it allows the doctor to determine not only the nature of the disease, but also the problems caused by it throughout the body - for example, to determine the localization of metastases: if breast cancer metastasizes to the lungs, it can be determined by specific proteins that will secrete lung tissue into the blood.

Experimental versions of the chip are undergoing clinical trials at the University of California (Los Angeles). With their help, 35 proteins are monitored to assess the response of patients to the treatment of aggressive forms of brain and skin cancer.

To date, Integrated Diagnostics has not yet published a list of diseases that their test system will detect. However, it is known that the database used includes proteins synthesized by brain tissues, which will allow early detection and monitoring of the progression of diseases of the central nervous system such as Kreuzfeld-Jakob disease, Alzheimer's disease and brain cancer.

Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru Based on Technology Review: Blood Test Offers More Accurate Picture of Health.

23.10.2009