SPR Able To Provide Early Warning For Alzheimer’s Disease!
#-Link-Snipped-# (SPR) chip, a comparatively new technology, along with high-sensitivity complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) imaging, could be used to develop a handheld or a small desktop device, that will provide early vital signs of Alzheimer's, if any.#-Link-Snipped-#
Prof Mike Somekh, project collaborator and an optical engineer at Nottingham University, explained that although diagnostic chips are starting to find their way into the clinic for certain applications, other conditions present a significant challenge. "With some diseases, there are single markers or chemicals that will actually give you a good indication of the diagnosis. But a lot of other diseases such as Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative conditions are represented by a pattern of markers, so you have to see how they are interrelated to each other to get a good, accurate diagnosis. That then imposes a constraint on the engineer to develop a platform with multiple sites for analysis."
Keeping this in mind, Somekh started working on SPR, a composite process that basically measures the adsorption of two molecules based on their evanescent wave refractive index. In contrast to other detection techniques, it does not call for the usage of fluorescence or radioactive tagging, which is time consuming and clumsy. This makes SPR suited for the high-output analysis of multiple markers at the same time.
The concept Somekh visualizes postulates a sandwich structure consisting a layer of gold film attached to an froze antibody that ‘grabs’ the disease markers when they are present in a blood sample. When this type of  complex forms, it develops a signature light refraction that can be discovered by an appropriately sensitive CMOS imaging chip. He said, "The way it will work is there’ll be the optical side with the associated detection and then the biological side. That gold layer not only acts as a medium on which the surface plasmon propagate but it’s also the interface between the biology and the engineering."
Prof Mike Somekh, project collaborator and an optical engineer at Nottingham University, explained that although diagnostic chips are starting to find their way into the clinic for certain applications, other conditions present a significant challenge. "With some diseases, there are single markers or chemicals that will actually give you a good indication of the diagnosis. But a lot of other diseases such as Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative conditions are represented by a pattern of markers, so you have to see how they are interrelated to each other to get a good, accurate diagnosis. That then imposes a constraint on the engineer to develop a platform with multiple sites for analysis."
Keeping this in mind, Somekh started working on SPR, a composite process that basically measures the adsorption of two molecules based on their evanescent wave refractive index. In contrast to other detection techniques, it does not call for the usage of fluorescence or radioactive tagging, which is time consuming and clumsy. This makes SPR suited for the high-output analysis of multiple markers at the same time.
The concept Somekh visualizes postulates a sandwich structure consisting a layer of gold film attached to an froze antibody that ‘grabs’ the disease markers when they are present in a blood sample. When this type of  complex forms, it develops a signature light refraction that can be discovered by an appropriately sensitive CMOS imaging chip. He said, "The way it will work is there’ll be the optical side with the associated detection and then the biological side. That gold layer not only acts as a medium on which the surface plasmon propagate but it’s also the interface between the biology and the engineering."
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