George Whitesides has developed a prototype for paper "chip" technology that could be used in the developing world to cheaply diagnose deadly diseases such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis and gastroenteritis. The first products will be available in about a year, he said. His efforts, which find their inspiration from the simple designs of comic books and computer chips, are surprisingly low-tech and cheap. Patients put a drop of blood on one side of the slip of paper, and on the other appears a colorful pattern in the shape of a tree, which tells medical professionals whether the person is infected with certain diseases. Water-repellent comic-book ink saturates several layers of paper, he said. The ink funnels a patient's blood into tree-like channels, where several layers of treated paper react with the blood to create diagnostic colors. It's not entirely unlike a home pregnancy test, Whitesides said, but the chips are much smaller and cheaper, and they test for multiple diseases at once. They also show how severely a person is infected rather than producing only a positive-negative reading.
1More
Tung, Barreiro, Johnson, Gilad Social stress affects immune system gene expression in m... - 0 views
1More
Grassroots Nanotech: Controlled Self-Assembly - 0 views
Computer Chips That Make Themselves - 0 views
2More
We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong - 0 views
1 - 12 of 12
Showing 20▼ items per page