Purdue develops at home wearable preeclampsia testing device

supine pressor test

Researchers at Purdue University are working on an app-based preeclampsia testing that enables pregnant women to use a smartphone to detect her risk of developing preeclampsia.

The team, led by Craig Goergen, an assistant professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering is modifying the way the underused tool called the supine pressor test records the Blood Pressure for a pregnant woman.

“We hope this will allow us to predict and prevent preeclampsia and reduce the number of children born prematurely each year. This could also reduce the long-term health complications for mothers,” Goergen said.

Other team members include George Wodicka, the Dane A. Miller Head of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue, and Kirk Forster, a senior research engineer at the Weldon School.

The supine pressor test measures a woman’s blood pressure in two different positions and the difference predicts her risk of developing the disease. But, to carry out the test, a woman must go visit the hospital or other healthcare providers, not an easy task in some parts of the world.

The researchers are working to combine available existing technologies such as smartphones, a conventional inflatable blood pressure cuff, and a wireless accelerometer (which measures body position) to build an innovative prototype that will detect preeclampsia before it develops.

  

A supine pressor test is an old, valuable tool that assesses blood flow through the kidney, and 90 percent of women with a positive test eventually develop preeclampsia. The women can send the test results to a doctor's office, a health-care system or a centralized network for the results to be read.

Based on the results the women can receive advice about prevention and early management to avoid the development of terminal consequences.

The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 10 percent of all maternal deaths in Africa and Asia are associated with hypertensive disorders during pregnancy and 25 percent of all maternal deaths in Latin America. Most of those deaths are avoidable, according to the WHO.

The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology issued a report last year estimating the costs to the U.S. health-care system for preeclampsia at $2.18 billion for the first 12 months after birth  — $1.03 billion for mothers, and $1.15 billion for babies.

The researchers received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in November.

While the Gates Foundation’s goal is to help women in developing countries, Goergen said the device the Purdue researchers are working on also could help women in inner cities and rural areas of the United States and other developed countries.

Here is video by the lead scientist Craig Goergen about the app and wearable device

Purdue News Release

Ob/Gyn Updated Facebook page

New surgical glue that works well in wet environment on the horizon.

Staples and surgical sutures will soon be a thing of past. Researchers at Purdue University have developed a nontoxic, biocompatible glue from adhesive proteins produced by mussels and other creatures.

The paper was published in April in Journal Biomaterials.

The material is unique because it is able to work while immersed in a water environment, and have shown to be far better than other current commercially available products.

The material is currently named ELY16, is constructed from an elastin-like polypeptide (ELP) that can be produced in high quantity from Escherichia coli and can coacervate in response to environmental factors such as temperature, pH, and salinity.  

ELY16 is rich in tyrosine and after reaction with tyrosine kinase it is changed into mELY16, converting the tyrosine residue into 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA).

Both these compounds (ELY16 and mELY16) are cytocompatible and exhibit significant dry strength. Addition of DOPA makes them adherent in humid environment.

Julie Liu, an associate professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Purdue University said, “Sutures and staples have several disadvantages relative to adhesives, including patient discomfort, higher risk of infection and the inherent damage to surrounding healthy tissue.”

It is estimated that 230 million major surgeries are performed worldwide every year and 12 million trauma patients are treated in USA each year. About 60% of these wounds are closed by surgical suture or staples.

“Current biomedical adhesive technologies do not meet these needs,” she said. “We designed a bioinspired protein system that shows promise to achieve biocompatible underwater adhesion coupled with environmentally responsive behavior that is ‘smart,’ meaning it can be tuned to suit a specific application.”

The initial tests were done aluminum substrates, but the researchers will soon start testing with soft body tissue like substrates to make it suitable for biomedical purposes.

“To our knowledge, mELY16 provides the strongest bonds of any engineered protein when used completely underwater, and its high yields make it more viable for commercial application compared to natural adhesive proteins,” she said. “So it shows great potential to be a new smart underwater adhesive.”

Here is the YouTube video ‘Non-toxic underwater adhesive could bring new surgical glue’

  

Source: Purdue University News letter.

Test strips for point of care detection of cervical cancer: Reality in near future.

A prototype of  test strip that could be used for the early detection of cervical cancer.
(Credit: Purdue Research Foundation photo/Curt Slyder)

Researchers at Purdue are developing technology that could enable us to detect cervical cancer with low-cost, easy-to-use, lateral flow test strips that are very similar to home pregnancy tests.

Joseph Irudayaraj, professor of biological engineering in Purdue’s School of Agricultural and Biological Engineering “This field really needs an additional way to test for cervical cancer. A test that can report cervical cancer right away is very instrumental in a lot of low- and middle-income countries where women often get HPV tests and then never come back. In higher-income countries, it’s important that anything beyond HPV tests have the ability to complement those tests.”

The technology developed by Purdue researchers works on the basis of color change of the strip that is visible to naked eye within 15-20 minutes because of reaction with proteins that are specific for cervical cancer.

Using proteomics and bioinformatics, researchers have identified valosin-containing protein (VCP) that are expressed differentially between normal specimens and those with cervical intra-epithelial neoplasia grade 2/3 (CIN2/CIN3+) or worse.

VCP-specific immunohistochemical staining (validated by a point-of-care technology) provided sensitive (93%) and specific (88%) identification of CIN2/CIN3+ and may serve as a critical biomarker for cervical-cancer screening.

The paper was published earlier in April 2016 in Journal of Oncotarget .

Combining proteomics and lateral-flow immunochromatography (LFIC) technology the researchers have formulated a simple point of care test for cervical cancer screening that can be used in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Pap cytology followed by further evaluation using HPV DNA/ colposcopy and biopsy for abnormal cytology test is the current screening test for detecting cervical cancer. This multistep process that depends on recall system is not sustainable in LMICs.

About 84% of cervical cancer cases occur in low- and middle-income countries, where it is still diagnosed at very late stage leading to high morbidity and mortality according to the World Cancer Research Fund International.

Researchers have already documented the proof of concept are working on the early prototype for the technology, and improving sensitivity and specificity.

“We’re working to greatly improve the detection limit of our testing,” said Wen Ren, a Purdue postdoctoral researcher working with Irudayaraj. “That will make it much easier to detect cervical cancer based on a very low amount of markers in smaller samples.”

Additional work is also underway to develop the test for additional samples like cervical lavage specimens, PreservCyt specimens and cervical swabs.

Larger studies are needed for robust clinical validation and commercialization of the test.

The technology could be of use to detect other diseases in future including pathogens of infectious disease.