It’s long been understood that early disease detection is the key to successful treatments. But annual checkups with a doctor might not be frequent enough to help. So imagine if you could forego a trip to the doctor’s office and detect any disease with a simple urine or saliva test at home.
Of course this has been the aim of lab-on-a-chip technologies for years now, but now scientists at IBM Research may have tipped the scales in the technology that could make such at home tests real.
In cross-disciplinary research described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, a team at IBM led by research scientist Joshua Smith and Gustavo Stolovitzky, program director of IBM Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology, has been able to retool silicon-based technologies to create a diagnostic device that can separate viruses, DNA, and other nanoscale-sized biological targets from saliva or urine. This could enable the device to detect the presence of diseases before any physical symptoms are visible.