A team of UCLA researchers has found a way to speed and simplify the detection of proteins in blood and plasma opening up the potential for diagnosing the early presence of infectious diseases or cancer during a doctor's office visit. The new test takes about 10 minutes as opposed to two to four hours for current state-of-the-art tests. The new approach overcame several key challenges in detecting proteins that are biomarkers of disease. First, these proteins are often at low abundance in body fluids and accurately identifying them requires amplification processes. The current approach uses enzymes to amplify the signal from proteins. However, enzymes can break down if they are not stored at proper temperatures. Also, to avoid a false positive, excess enzymes need to be washed away. This increases the complexity and cost of the test. http://phys.org/news/2016-08-method-infectious-diseases-cancer.html Paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.6b02060
