There will be new device to detect disease with drop of blood

Professor Eginald Farrow and his partners’ cutting-edge work with carbon nanotubes is the fore path to a new device, a prototype lab-on-a-chip that would someday enable a physician to detect disease or virus from just one drop of liquid, including blood.

The article entitled “Scalable nano-bioprobes with sub-cellular resolution for cell detection” will publish on July 15, 2013 but is available now online, describes how NJIT research professors Reginald Farrow and Alokik Kanwal, his former postdoctoral fellow, and their team have created a carbon nanotube-based device to noninvasively and quickly detect mobile single cells with the potential to maintain a high degree of spatial resolution.

In the article, the NJIT researchers evaluated three different types of cells using three different electrical probes. "It was an exploratory study and we don't want to say that we have a signature," Farrow added. "What we do say here is that these cells differ based on electrical properties. Establishing a signature, however, will take time, although we know that the distribution of electrical charges in a healthy cell changes markedly when it becomes sick."