Diagnosing cancer and heart disease generally requires extensively trained personnel and expensive instruments. But one MIT research group that wants to solve that problem has designed a single injection and paper-based detection system they’re hoping to ship them everywhere a letter can travel.
Sangee Bhatia’s team developed a molecular detection system that brings a bunch of existing technologies together in a new way to perform this test. Once approved for use in humans, it’ll work like this: First you’ll get an injection of a nanoparticle solution that can bond to the antibodies generated by cancer or heart disease.
Next, you’ll pee onto the test paper, and if a nanoparticle that’s bonded with some antibodies comes comes out, it’ll hit the paper and change colors. So far, in Bhatia’s animal studies,this paper-based detection system successfully detected colon tumours and blood clotting, and the hope is that it can be expanded to detect even more things.