Drug Designing: Open Access
Open Access
ISSN: 2169-0138
+44 1223 790975
ISSN: 2169-0138
+44 1223 790975
Ramses V Martinez
Purdue University, USA
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Drug Des
This talk will describe the point-of-care detection of Chagas disease in whole blood solutions using magnetic levitating microbeads (MLmBs). This simple and label-free diagnostic method can be easily performed by minimally trained personnel using an inexpensive and portable magnetic stage that requires no electricity. The diagnostic method starts by mixing a solution of whole blood containing T. cruzi antibodies (Chagas) with diamagnetic microbeads functionalized with p24 proteins. After an incubation time of 40 min, some anti T. cruzi antibodies get covalently attached to the p24 proteins coating the microbeads, modifying their density. Shaking the test tube suspends the microbeads in a paramagnetic aqueous buffer, where the beads attached to anti T. cruzi antibodies levitate at a different height than the rest once the tube is placed between two anti-aligned permanent magnets with their direction of magnetization perpendicular to gravitational force. When non-polarized light passes through the levitating beads, it is possible to visually identify groups of beads levitating at different heights, detecting the presence of T. cruzi antibodies in the sample. Tuning the distance between magnets and the experimental protocol to bind T. cruzi antibodies to the microbeads, enables the optimization of the sensitivity of these tests up to the clinically relevant range, with a detection limit appropriate for clinically relevant applications. The small size of the test samples in comparison with the area of the magnets facilitates multiplexed analysis (>100 samples). While these assays are relatively slow (approx. 1h), they have the potential to open new possibilities in point-of-care diagnosis, animal and plant pathology, environmental monitoring, and biochemical analysis in low-resource settings.
E-mail: rmartinez@purdue.edu