| Project Detail |
Obesity is one of the most common and costly chronic disorder worldwide, and is a causal or a strong risk factor for several comorbidities, as type 2 diabetes (T2D), which is now reaching epidemic proportions. To monitor multifactorial disorders such as obesity and T2D, clinical evidences from more than one energetic biomarker are crucial. Current multiplexed systems present limited multiplicity capacities because they combine individual tests spatially separated from the others requiring complex and bulky instruments (e.g. HPLC), so they are difficult to operate out of the laboratory. Other described tests also cannot be adapted to monitor chronic disorders because they present at least one of the following critical limitations: (1) they are semi-quantitative (e.g. lateral flow test) so cannot perform the analyte monitoring to the required level of precision, (2) restricted to a single analyte which does not address the accepted criteria that an obesity management requires clinical evidence from multiple biomarkers and/or (3) cannot integrate the microfluidic processing required for blood analysis.
To overcome current limitations, a novel multiplexed medical device is proposed here to enable for the very first time the fully control and management of chronic disorders as obesity and T2D. This will combine optics, electrochemistry, microfluidics and optoelectronics to monitor the most appropriate energy biomarkers (succinate as novel metabolite, in addition to lactate, ketones, pyruvate and glycaemia) in a friendly and decentralised way. No one has previously proposed a useful multiplexed approach as this, allowing the opportunity of the control of a particular energy biomarker such as succinate, which will facilitate current chronic disorders management. Thus, this novel cost-effective and portable multiplexed medical device, with unique and unprecedented attributes, will play a role key in the accurate management of chronic disorders. |
