The University of Queensland researchers have invented a chip that uses a drop of blood to identify patients at risk of a potentially lethal uncontrolled immune response, known medically as a “cytokine storm”.If approved by medical regulators, it may one day help healthcare workers to detect high-risk patients and improve their treatment.
Professor Matt Trau, of UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, said while the “immuno-storm chip” was still in the early stages of development, it had been successfully trialled in dozens of cancer patients undergoing immunotherapy.He said it was “100 per cent accurate” in predicting adverse immune responses in some of the cancer patients – a complication of immunotherapy drugs.The device uses nanotechnology to pick up proteins in a patient’s blood, known as cytokines. It is so sensitive it can detect single molecules, making it about 1000 times more sensitive than conventional pathology tests.“Cytokines play a critical role in triggering inflammation by stimulating the movement of immune cells towards sites of injury or infection,” Professor Trau said.“When this becomes uncontrolled and causes damage, more cytokines are produced and it becomes a vicious cycle, called a cytokine storm.”The test can be adapted to detect different cytokines depending on the disease and the chip is capable of measuring multiple cytokines at the same time.For example, scientists have identified a specific cytokine storm signature associated with acute COVID-19.
“Whether in a cancer treatment setting or when monitoring infectious diseases, such as acute COVID-19, long-haul COVID-19 and sepsis, the chip could provide critical medical information that guides important clinical decisions,” Professor Trau said.“We’re really proud of this work. We think it could be really significant because it’s a general platform technology for cancer, infectious disease, and it could also potentially have a role in monitoring auto-immune diseases.”The chip detects a faint, but distinctive, pattern of cytokines in the days before a “full-blown” storm.Professor Trau said the researchers hoped to partner with other organisations to potentially take the chip into broader clinical trials.“This is not a test that’s available to the public right now,” he said. “Diagnostic tests take time and this is a brand new discovery enabled by an ultrasensitive and powerful new technology.”More trials are needed on much larger groups of patients to validate the technology across a range of diseases.Early research on the test has been published in the journal, Nature Communications.
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