For delivering the faster and convenient medical tests, the researchers of Washington State University have developed a portable and low-cost laboratory on a Smartphone that can be used to analyze many samples at once. This can catch a cancer biomarker and can produce the lab quality results. As now both medical professionals and patients are expecting faster results, so researchers are trying to translate the bio detection technologies into the clinic and field. With the availability of this technology, patients will be able to get instant diagnoses in the physician’s office, the emergency room or an ambulance. An eight channel Smartphone spectrometer created by the research team can easily detect the human interleukin-6 (IL – 6), a known biomarker for liver, prostate, breast, lung and epithelial cancers. A spectrometer can analyze the type and amount of chemicals in a sample by measuring its light spectrum.
“This Smartphone spectrometer will be very useful in hospitals and clinics which have a lot of samples without the on-site labs or in remote areas or for doctors who practice abroad”, said Lei Li, who is an Assistant Professor and lead researcher in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. Li noted, “They cannot carry the whole lab with them. They need an efficient and portable device. The existing Smartphone spectrometers can only measure or monitor the single sample at a time, which makes them inefficient for real world applications. The spectrometer with multichannel can measure up to eight different samples at a time using the common test called ELISA that identifies color change and antibodies as disease markers, according to the study published in a journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics. According to Li, who has filed the provisional patent for work, this eight channel spectrometer can put eight types of samples to do the same test or a single sample in the eight unique wells for eight different tests. Currently, this system works only with iPhone 5, but the researchers are creating a design that will be compatible with all Smartphones.