A microfluidic biochip platform for electrical quantification of proteins

Enrique Valera, Jacob Berger, Umer Hassan, Tanmay Ghonge, Julia Liu, Michael Rappleye, Jackson Winter, Daniel Abboud, Zeeshan Haidry, Ryan Healey, Na-Teng Hung, Nathaniel Leung, Naif Mansury, Alexander Hasnain, Christine Lannon, Zachary Price, Karen White, Rashid Bashir

Index: 10.1039/C8LC00033F

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Abstract

Sepsis, an adverse auto-immune response to an infection often causing life-threatening complications, results in the highest mortality and treatment cost of any illness in US hospitals. Several immune biomarker levels, including Interleukin 6 (IL-6), have shown a high correlation to the onset and progression of sepsis. Currently, no technology diagnoses and stratifies sepsis progression using biomarker levels. This paper reports a microfluidic biochip platform to detect proteins in undiluted human plasma samples. The device uses a differential enumeration platform that integrates Coulter counting principles, antigen specific capture chambers, and micro size bead based immunodetection to quantify cytokines. This microfluidic biochip was validated as a potential point of care technology by quantifying IL-6 from plasma samples (n = 29) with good correlation (R2 = 0.81) and agreement (Bland–Altman) compared to controls. In combination with previous applications, this point of care platform can potentially detect cell and protein biomarkers simultaneously for sepsis stratification.