Point-of-care (POC) diagnostic devices hold great promise to significantly impact healthcare delivery and address health disparities by shifting the focus away from the utilization of high-cost specialized care for the treatment of late-stage diseases toward predictive, preventative, and personalized health for more effective disease monitoring and management. In the developed world, POC technologies are expected to offer effective and feasible means of reducing healthcare costs and improving patient care, whereas in the developing world POC technologies are urgently needed to address pressing healthcare needs with affordable and accessible solutions.
In this talk, I will first provide a brief overview of the field of POC technologies for health diagnostics. To showcase an example, I will next present our work on ClotChip, a microfluidic sensor that utilizes dielectric spectroscopy for POC assessment of blood coagulation disorders with <10 uL of whole blood. Specifically, I will analyze a simple circuit model that accurately captures the frequency-dependent dielectric behavior of human whole blood placed within a microfluidic channel. I will then discuss how temporal variation in the dielectric properties of the blood sample undergoing coagulation provides information about molecular and cellular abnormalities in the hemostatic process.
Finally, to establish the utility of ClotChip as a platform technology for POC assessment of hemostasis, I will share our results from a pilot clinical study with ClotChip on monitoring anticoagulation therapy with a new class of FDA-approved blood thinners. Results from correlative studies between ClotChip and several existing blood coagulation assays are also provided.
|