Recently, Ph.D. student Yan Gong from BEBC has published her
first author paper in International
Journal of Nanomedicine entitled "Improved Lateral Flow
Immunoassays for Highly-Sensitive Detection of Brain Natriuretic Peptide at the
Point of Care ".
Heart failure (HF) has become
a major cause of morbidity and mortality with a
significant global economic burden.
Although well-established clinical tests could provide early diagnosis, access
to these tests is limited in developing countries where a relatively higher
incidence of HF is present. This has prompted an urgent need for developing a
cost-effective, rapid and robust diagnostic tool for point-of-care (POC)
detection of HF. Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) has
found widespread applications in POC diagnostics. However, the low sensitivity
of LFIA limits its ability to detect important HF biomarkers (e.g., BNP) that
are normally present in low concentration in blood. To address this issue, we developed
an improved LFIA by optimizing the gold nanoparticle-antibody conjugate
conditions, the diameter of GNP and the concentration of antibody at the test
line, and modifying the structure of test strip. Through these improvements,
the proposed test strip enables the detection of BNP down to 0.1 ng/mL within 10-15
minutes, presenting ~15-fold sensitivity enhancement
over conventional lateral flow assay. We also successfully applied our LFIA in
the analysis of BNP in human serum samples, highlighting its potential use for
clinical assessment of HF. The developed LFIA for BNP could rapidly rule out HF
with the naked eye, offering tremendous potential for POC and personalized
medicine.
The
work is under the guidance of Professor Feng Xu and Dr. Ting Wen. The
co-authors of the paper include Jie Hu, Jane Ru Choi, Minli You, Yamin Zheng
and Bo Xu.