Team:Freiburg/Project/Future Directions
Future Direction
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.
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.