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When Smaller Is Better for Biological Scanning

March 27, 2014 By Angela Herring, Northeastern University

Assistant professor of pharmaceutical science Tania Konry is developing new testing platforms to make her revolutionary ScanDrop system relevant for a host of diagnostic and research applications. Photo by Brooks CanadayA few hun­dred dol­lars and 24 hours: That’s what’s required to scan bio­log­ical mate­rials for impor­tant bio­markers that signal dis­eases such as dia­betes or cancer, using industry stan­dard equip­ment. But sup­pose you wanted to mon­itor live cancer cells. For that you’d have to use an entirely dif­ferent method. It takes just as long but requires a whole other set of expen­sive top-​​end instru­men­ta­tion. Want to look at bac­teria instead? Be pre­pared to wait a few days for it to grow before you can get a mean­ingful result.

Researchers face enor­mous time con­straints and finan­cial hur­dles from having to run these analyses on a reg­ular basis. To solve this problem, Tania Konry, an assis­tant pro­fessor of phar­ma­ceu­tical sci­ences at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity, has devel­oped a single instru­ment that can do all of the scans men­tioned above at a frac­tion of the time and cost. That’s because it uses con­sid­er­ably less mate­rial and ultra-​​sensitive detec­tion methods to do the same thing.

Konry’s cre­ation, Scan­Drop, is a portable instru­ment no bigger than a shoebox that has the capacity to detect a variety of bio­log­ical spec­imen. For that reason it will ben­efit a wide range of users beyond the med­ical com­mu­nity, including envi­ron­mental mon­i­toring and basic sci­en­tific research.

The instru­ment acts as a minia­ture sci­ence lab, of sorts. It con­tains a tiny chip, made of polymer or glass, that is con­nected to equally tiny tubes. An extremely small-​​volume liquid sample—whether it’s water or a bio­log­ical fluid such as serum—flows in one of those tubes, through the lab-​​on-​​a-​​chip device, and out the other side. While inside, the sample is exposed to a slug of micro­scopic beads func­tion­al­ized to react with the lab test’s search para­me­ters. For example, one type of bead could be cov­ered with anti­bodies that selec­tively bind to e. coli to test water quality. Other types could detect cancer bio­markers or bind to the tetanus virus to test for immunity.

“It can be any bio­log­ical agent,” Konry said. “We take the same approach.”

The beads flu­o­resce when the spe­cific marker or cell in ques­tion has been detected; from there, an analysis by Scan­Drop can pro­vide the con­cen­tra­tion levels of that marker or cell.

Because the vol­umes being tested with Scan­Drop are so small, the testing time dwin­dles to just min­utes. This means you could get near-​​real time mea­sures of a changing sample—be it bac­teria levels in a flowing body of water or dynamic insulin levels in the blood­stream of a person with diabetes.

Konry noted that not only are other testing mech­a­nisms pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive, but they are also fairly use­less in the field—particularly in remote areas—because the instru­ments are large and require long times for analysis. By com­par­ison, ScanDrop’s porta­bility makes it much more func­tional and effi­cient in the field.

Her team recently joined forces with a group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which devel­oped soft­ware that can remotely con­trol ScanDrop’s activity from any­where on the planet. This func­tion­ality could be par­tic­u­larly useful when the instru­ment is set up in the field to con­tin­u­ously mon­itor the envi­ron­ment. The achieve­ment, Konry said, adds yet another level of effi­ciency to the system. The research was recently reported in the journal PLOS One.

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