PointofCare Blood Assay Using Differential Scanning Calorimetry to Diagnose Acute Myocardial Infarction
Project Abstract:
More than eight million Americans present to emergency rooms with chest pain while only 760000 of these patients are experiencing acute myocardial infarction MI The gold standard to diagnose MI is an assay to measure slowly increasing troponin levels in the blood However this test cannot differentiate between Type 1 thrombotic and Type 2 nonthrombotic MI Differential scanning calorimetry DSC is an analytical technique that measures the thermal profile of biomolecules that may provide a potential method for accurate MI diagnosis Preliminary studies have shown that thermograms were distinct among stable coronary artery disease Type 1 and Type 2 MI subjects at acute presentation and similar at quiescent state However the development of DSC as a clinical tool has been hampered by the need for specialized training expensive instrumentation and notoriously low sample throughput The objective of this proposal is to develop a chipbased DSC with a disposable sample preparation module to enable rapid data collection and processing substantially increasing the ability to analyze a larger quantity of samples The technology developed in this project will be evaluated with DSC standards and compared to conventional DSC instrumentation The proposed work overcomes the limitations of current DSC instrumentation to enable the transformation of DSC into a pointofcare blood diagnostic assay to provide rapid inclinic testing The proposed platform will provide a sensitive and costeffective analysis with the potential to provide a rapid and portable diagnostic aid for MI
