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- Drawing blood is a common way for doctors to check for disease
- This process can be uncomfortable, especially for individuals with a fear of needles
- A new microneedle patch that can detect biomarkers may be the solution
Drawing blood is a convenient way for medical practitioners to get a glimpse of what is happening inside our bodies. It allows doctors to check for biomarkers of disease, such as antibodies, which indicate bacterial and viral infection.
While this is a vital practice, drawing blood can be painful, especially for those who suffer from trypanophobia (an extreme fear of medical procedures involving needles).
Fortunately, these biomarkers do not only appear in blood, but also in what is known as interstitial fluid (ISF) – fluid found in spaces between cells. It was, however, quite difficult to detect interstitial protein biomarkers, until now.
No more needle trauma
Thanks to a group of engineers and medical researchers, testing for biomarkers of disease can now be done without the trauma of facing those invasive needles used to draw blood.
These innovative researchers have developed a microneedle patch that is able to identify the necessary biomarkers by simply applying the patch to a person’s skin. A paper describing the invention was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on 22 January.
The researchers state in their paper that the patches are not only minimally invasive, but also relatively cheap and easy to use.
How it works
The microneedle patches work in a similar way to blood testing when it comes to identifying biomarkers.
With blood testing, a solution needs to be added to the blood sample in order to find biomarkers, whereas with microneedle patches, the biomarkers are directly obtained from the ISF. The patches are also practically pain-free: “They go about 400 microns deep into the dermal tissue,” said Srikanth Singamaneni, corresponding author of the study. “They don't even touch sensory nerves.”
Important innovation for patients and medical practitioners
The researchers noted that these patches can be useful for chronic patients – where observation over time is required – or for emergencies as one of the lead authors, Jingyi Luan, explains: “When someone complains of chest pain and they are being taken to the hospital in an ambulance, we're hoping right then and there, the patch can be applied.”
It can also assist doctors, now that Covid-19 vaccines are being administered, to monitor whether the correct antibodies are being produced.
According to Singamaneni, it is as easy as: “Let's put a patch on, and let's see whether the person has antibodies against Covid-19 and at what level.”
Image credit: Unsplash
