A research team led by two departments at National Chung Cheng University (CCU) has developed a sepsis rapid test that can accurately detect the infection in eight minutes using only one drop of blood. The test was the result of a collaboration between CCU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemistry.
CCU said Thursday that 160,000 people in Taiwan are diagnosed with sepsis every year, most through the expertise of experienced doctors. The ideal window of diagnosis for the condition is within six hours, after which a patient’s survival rate drops below 50%. For this reason, rapid and accurate diagnosis is critical for doctors to administer life-saving care.
Currently, most clinical sepsis tests rely on ELISA (enzyme-linked immunoassay) technology, which requires large and medium machinery, a clinical lab, and can take 8 to 12 hours to process.
This need for rapid testing is precisely what motivated CCU Mechanical Engineering Professor Chang Guo-En (張國恩) and Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Chau Lai-Kwan (周禮君). Chang states their rapid screening test utilizes nanotechnology to more accurately detect relevant biomarkers of sepsis in only eight minutes.
CCU pointed out that this new technology could be applied to other diseases such as Alzheimer’s in the future. Chang and Chau’s work was selected as the cover of the American Chemical Society’s “Nano Letters” journal in which it was published last January.