Researchers at Stanford University have achieved a commendable breakthrough in the field of one of the deadliest and slow-killing diseases around the world – Type 1 Diabetes.They have invented a microchip-based test for diagnosing type-1 diabetes that not only brings down diagnosis times and costs but will also help further research related to the disease.
Priced at $20, this chip has a lot of advantages. First is that it can be used to conduct multiple blood tests (upto 15 times) and it requires a very less amount of blood in order to function. The current pathological solutions require you to give a substantial amount of blood in order to test you for the disease but this chip works on just a drop of blood which can be acquired by a simple prick of the skin.
The $20 price tag is really cheap comparing it to the currently used pathological test methods and it will be beneficial in the long run by all income-group patients!
Here is a quick snippet from the Stanford Press-release about how the Detection Chip Works:
Type-1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease caused by an inappropriate immune-system attack on healthy tissue. As a result, patients’ bodies stop making insulin, a hormone that plays a key role in processing sugar. The disease begins when a person’s own antibodies attack the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. The auto-antibodies are present in people with type-1 but not those with type-2, which is how tests distinguish between them.
It really feels good when we see use of technology to achieve such groundbreaking progress that help us lead a better life. Remember FingerReader? – the device that lets blind / visually challenged people to read regular books without braille!
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