A new report from Arizona State University researchers shows new technology could greatly expand disease-tracking efforts in communities.
That could all be done by using one test.
The study showed that researchers could check for roughly 150 pathogens using just a pinprick of blood from each of the 2,400 participants. Results could come within a day.
Executive Director of ASU’s Biodesign Institute Joshua LaBaer is an author of the study.
He says the tool could help health organizations expand pathogen tracking in communities.
"Typically right now it's done one thing at a time. This tool would allow scientists to do that same kind of approach for large populations, but not look at one thing, look at, you know, 200 different things," LaBaer said.
But beyond community testing, they are looking into other applications as well.
“Monitoring patients overtime for, you know, their illnesses, chronic illnesses, looking at autoantibodies and autoimmune diseases, look at antibodies in the context of cancer.” LaBaer said.
His coauthor, Lusheng Song, says despite accurate protein detection, some diseases don’t have other clinical tests to compare their results to.
“There is no current validation method to make sure that what we see is what we see. That is one of the big challenges," Song said.
The team is working on validation methods for their upcoming study, which is examining over 11,000 people.
The study was published in the Journal Microbiology Spectrum.
