Chip diagnoses type 1 diabetes in minutes

Type 1 diabetes can be clinically indistinguishable from type 2 diabetes and a definitive diagnosis, using radioimmunoassay, is slow and expensive to perform. Researchers, led by Brian Feldman, from Stanford University, have used nanotechnology to develop a plasmonic gold chip that can diagnose the disease within minutes.

The chip uses near-infrared fluorescence to detect islet cell-targeting autoantibodies in a fingerprick blood sample, and costs just $20 to produce, according to the report in Nature Medicine (online, 13 July 2014).

When tested in diabetes patients and healthy controls, the chip had high sensitivity and specificity for the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. It can also be used to discover previously unknown biomarkers of type 1 diabetes, adds Feldman.