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Scientists from the University of Twente and the Radboud University Nijmegen, both in The Netherlands, have developed a new imaging technique which can provide a fast and accurate profile of auto antibodies present in the blood serum of rheumatic patients.
The profiling system can give valuable information about the progress of the disease. A unique feature of the surface plasmon resonance technique is that it directly tests blood serum, without complex preprocessing, such as adding fluorescent labels. A chip developed by the scientists makes it possible to conduct many tests in parallel.
The researchers have run tests on the serum of 50 rheumatoid arthritis patients and a control group of 29. The diluted serum is allowed to run over gold-coated microchip dotted with a specific peptide coating. Whenever these peptides attract auto antibodies present in the serum, the linkage is monitored by SPR.
The interaction between the peptide and the antibody can be monitored real-time, without any labels.
The applications are not limited to monitoring rheumatism or other autoimmune diseases; the SPR imaging can be used for monitoring a wide range of biomolecular interactions.
The research was led by Richard Schasfoort of the BIOS Lab-on-a-chip group, part of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology of the University of Twente, working with the Ger Pruijn at the Biomolecular Chemistry group of the Radboud University Nijmegen, The work was financed by the Dutch Technology Foundation as part of its “Proteomics on a chip for monitoring autoimmune diseases” programme.
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