Recently, Ph.D. student Minli You from BEBC has
published his research paper in ACS Nano (IF=13.334) entitled "Household Fluorescent Lateral Flow Strip Platform
for Sensitive and Quantitative Prognosis of Heart Failure Using Dual-Color
Upconversion Nanoparticles ". This paper has now been selected to highlight by American Chemical
Society (ACS) Office of Public Affairs’ Weekly PressPac.
Heart failure (HF) is the end-stage of
cardiovascular diseases, arousing about 35% risk of death in the first year
after diagnosis and more than 50% patients readmitted to the hospital within 6
months of discharge. Prognosis
of HF at home is of vital importance to prevent adverse cardiac events and
decrease readmission rate. Now, we have developed a new test strip that could
potentially allow patients to do this at home for the first time.
Antigens called ST2 and BNP are good indicators
of HF and how it’s progressing. But currently, analyzing the levels of these
biomarkers requires trained personnel and sophisticated lab equipment. We wanted
to devise a simple test to enable doctors and patients to carry out the same
analysis at the office or at home. Therefor, a fluorescent paper-based test was
developed that requires only a small blood sample of 10 microliters. A green
dot glows on the strip if ST2 is present in the sample, and a blue dot glows if
it contains BNP. The colors’ intensities increase with concentration, which
indicates a person’s heart failure is likely becoming worse. A smartphone app
can analyze the readout and send the results to the patient’s doctor, who can
adjust the patient’s treatment accordingly. Testing 38 serum samples from
people with heart failure showed that the paper test closely matched
conventional techniques.
The work is under the guidance of Professor Feng
Xu and vice Professor Min Lin and cooperated with Mechanical Engineering School,
the First and Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University. The
co-authors of the paper include Yan Gong, Shurui Wang, Professor Ang Li, Lingyu
Ji, Haoxiang Zhao, Kai Ling, Doctor Ting Wen, Yuan Huang, Professor Dengfeng
Gao, Qiong Ma, Professor Tingzhong Wang, Professor Aiqun Ma and Professor
Xiaoling Li.
Article link: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.7b02466
