BOULDER, Colo. — CU Boulder has created a new device that could deliver blood test results right away.
When you go to a doctor's office for blood tests, it takes a few hours to a couple of days to get results. According to researchers, with this new device patients can get results in about an hour.
“It’s user friendly and it’s rapid, but it also maintains the same level of sensitivity as clinical approaches and dramatically simplifies the whole process," CU assistant professor if chemical and biological engineering, Wyatt Shields said.
The new portable device fits in the palm of a hand, it required only a prick of your finger to collect blood and the results should come back in about 70 minutes.
“We made this device that allows us to take up blood samples from a patient to process the blood samples to essentially captured specific biomarkers, which are small proteins inside of the blood that indicate the status of health or disease," Shields said. "Inside of this little pipet device we are able to pull out those important biomarkers and eventually quantify them outside of the pipet."
Shields said once your blood has been taken, it should be able to deliver precise readings.
The device could potentially play a role in measuring antibodies to determine whether someone needs a booster shot, test for allergies, or detect proteins associated with certain cancers.
“We show detection of an antibody, but it could also potentially be expanded to detect DNA, viruses, or even circulating tumor cells, so it’s a really flexible system and we could potentially detect a lot of things," CU graduate, Cooper Thome said.
According to researches, the device is still in the the early stages and more research needs to be done before it can be used anywhere else.
“What we show in our paper is definitely proof of concept, so it’s not something that’s being used right now, but it really introduces this new technology that sort of forms a foundation for technology that could be used in the real world to really simply this detection stuff," Thome said.