Assistant Professor Yeo Kee Thai (left) and Dr. Genevieve Llanora (from the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital Neonatology Department) demo the BLIPI device for newborn blood testing. [Photo courtesy of KKH]
The Biophysical Immune Profiling for Infants (BLIPI) device provides clinicians with real-time data to help detect life-threatening inflammatory conditions, such as sepsis and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). This rapid, low-volume testing could help protect highly vulnerable patients by enabling earlier and more targeted interventions.
“Our goal was to create a diagnostic tool that works within the unique constraints of neonatal care — minimal blood volume, rapid turnaround, and high sensitivity. BLIPI represents a major step forward by providing clinicians with fast, actionable immune health data using a noninvasive method, where it can make a real difference for newborns in critical care,” said Kerwin Kwek, research scientist at SMART CAMP and SMART AMR, and co-lead author of the study.
Addressing a critical diagnostic need
Premature infants are highly susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as newborn sepsis and NEC, but current diagnostic tools often require large blood samples and time-consuming lab work. BLIPI addresses this by requiring just 0.05 ml of blood, about 1/20th the volume of standard tests.
Because these conditions can progress rapidly, early and accurate immune profiling is essential. Traditional diagnostics like blood cultures and inflammatory panels may take hours or even days to return actionable results, making fast and low-volume testing especially critical in this patient population.
“BLIPI exemplifies our vision to bridge the gap between scientific innovation and clinical need,” said MIT Professor Jongyoon Han, co-lead principal investigator at SMART CAMP, principal investigator at SMART AMR, and corresponding author of the paper.
“By leveraging microfluidic technologies to extract real-time immune insights from whole blood, we are not only accelerating diagnostics but also redefining how we monitor immune health in fragile populations,” Han continued. “Our work reflects a new paradigm in point-of-care diagnostics: rapid, precise, and patient-centric.”
Microfluidics enable real-time immune response assessment
The device uses microfluidic technology to assess immune cells’ size and flexibility, key indicators of an immune response, rather than relying solely on detecting pathogens. Its measurements correlate with standard tests such as C-reactive protein levels, white blood cell counts, and immature-to-total neutrophil ratios.
The researchers screened 19 infants, eight of whom were full-term and 11 of whom were preterm, and observed immune cell behavior at multiple time points. When one premature infant developed a serious blood infection, BLIPI detected significant changes in immune cells.
BLIPI is designed for use at the bedside or in neonatal intensive care units, eliminating the need to send samples to a lab. It is portable and suited for low-resource healthcare environments, potentially expanding access to timely diagnostics in rural or underserved settings.
“With BLIPI, a single prick to the baby’s finger or heel can give us rapid insights into the infant’s immune response within minutes,” said Assistant Professor Yeo Kee Thai, senior consultant at the Department of Neonatology at KKH, and senior author of the study. “This allows us to tailor treatments more precisely and respond faster to give these fragile babies the best chance at a healthy start not just in their early days, but throughout their livesLooking ahead to wider clinical use.”
Future research will include larger clinical trials to validate BLIPI’s diagnostic accuracy across a broader range of newborn populations and conditions. Researchers also plan to refine the device’s design for broader adoption in hospitals.
Beyond clinical care, the team sees applications for the device in neonatal drug development. Pharmaceutical companies could use BLIPI to monitor infant immune responses to treatments in real time.
The research was supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore and the Nurturing Clinician Scientist Scheme under the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Clinical Programme.
