Team:Freiburg/Project/Future Directions

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Future Direction

Our DiaCHIP as innovative diagnostic device can be used to simultaneously detect antibodies for numerous diseases, requiring only a few drops of blood, thus allowing fast detection of an acute disease. We are developing a next generation diagnostic technology and hope to contribute positively to public health. Another advantage is the provision of simultaneous disease diagnostics that is, thanks to the DiaCHIP, accessible to everyone in a cheap and fast way. During our project we could show, that it building a measurement device can be done in a low-cost manner. Therefore it would be possible for hospitals or doctors all around the world to afford a measurement device. The biological part of our project involving the the DNA template chip, cell free expression and hence production of a protein chip to test for diseases is also easily manageable with on-site trained medical staff.

Our project keeps many possible applications at hand if we will be able to further optimize the cell-free expression system and the specific binding to the surface for generating a protein chip. Investigating a quantification method may allow medical professionals to make a conclusion concerning the state of vaccination of a patient and might render some additional immunizations unnecessary.

It could provide a tool for accurate analysis of the antibody titer of a person thus helping to keep up a constant protection against many diseases.

With further work on the DiaCHIP it could also be possible to distinguish between vaccines from different manufactures. This offers the opportunity to determine, whether the patient is vaccinated against a certain type of a virus. For expample the immunzation against HPV (human papillomavirus). Vaccines may prevent infections against different HPV types as HPV-16 and HPV-18 or HPV-11 and HPV-6, respectively. These types of HPV differ in the characteristics of the disease.

The DiaChip could also be used for pre-pregnancy test, where evaluation of the antibody titers against certain diseases like e.g. rubella or whooping cough is crucial. Here the safety of the unborn child relies on the health status of the mother, therefore exact knowlegde of possibly required immunizations before a pregnancy could be of major importance. With our chip this would be a matter of one test and half an hour (?) before the vaccination status is determined and the required vaccinations can be started.

Was die Zeitfrage angeht, so muss man aufpassen, wie der Workflow nachher wirklich ist. Geht man davon aus, dass die Proteine erst noch exprimiert werden müssen, kommen da schonmal 1-2h nur für die expression dazu. Dazu sieht es momentan so aus, dass man alleine 30 min zum blocken des slides braucht. Mit expression würde ich also sagen, dass das mindestens 3-4 h dauert ein Test...

One more possible application of the DiaChip is the use of it to pre-test blood from blood donations. For this test only a small amount of blood is needed and in approximately 30 minutes all necessary examinations could be done in just one test. This would simplify the testing of donated blood and minimize the time and costs involved in this.

Beyond fields of application in clinics as such, the suggested method of cell-free expression would simplify the preparation of protein microarrays on demand as no purification of protein is necessary anymore. This could be a major advantage in scientific research as handling and storage of protein arrays still poses some challenges. With our system of cell-free expression the production of protein arrays could provide an easy method to work with freshly produced protein chips. Such a cell-free produced microarray could be for example used to scan for epitopes.

In our iGEM project we were able to detect two diseases (Tetanus and Salmonella), but these are just two out of 1000 diseases our DiaCHIP will hold.

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