In Washington D.C., American Chemical Society researchers reported a new technique that uses ultrasound to concentrate fluorescently-labeled disease biomarkers otherwise impossible to detect with current equipment in an office setting. The markers’ signal could someday be analyzed with a smartphone camera and app.
Ultrasound is a safe, noninvasive, inexpensive and portable technique – best known for monitoring pregnancies – that is also used to gently handle blood components, cells and protein crystals at the microscopic level.
To detect even smaller particles and biomarkers for diseases such as cancer that often require special laboratory equipment to detect, the researchers developed an acoustofluidic chip that, through vibrations, can form a streaming vortex inside a tiny glass capillary tube using a minimal amount of energy. The nanoparticles captured biomarkers labeled with a fluorescent tag, concentrating them in the capillary to boost their signal. This increased brightness could make the signal readable with a smartphone camera.