Spinning drops of blood leads to better diagnosis of parasitic infections

Parasitic infections like malaria and sleeping sickness affect hundreds of millions of people, primarily in the poorest regions of the world. Diagnosis of these diseases is often difficult because the concentration of parasites in the blood can be very low and hard to measure. British scientists have now developed a simple chip-based method for enriching rare cells in blood samples, as reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie . This allows the detection limit for the parasites that cause malaria and sleeping sickness to be lowered by two to three orders of magnitude. Existing techniques for the separation and enrichment of parasites in blood samples are difficult to use in isolated regions and developing countries because they usually require complex chemistry for labeling cells, costly instruments, or extensive infrastructure. The new inexpensive technique developed by researchers headed by Professor Jonathan Cooper at the University of Glasgow requires only small amounts of power, works without labeling the cells, and uses just a drop of blood from a fingertip. Their innovative method is based on an acoustically-controlled microchip that is used in a battery-driven, hand-held device.