"Hormone meters" based on carbon nanotubes
Researchers of the newly created company Aneeve Nanotechnologies claim that the sensors they are developing to register hormone levels will revolutionize the treatment of infertility, menopause symptoms and other diseases associated with hormonal changes. The developers hope that this technology will allow them to "print" sensors to determine the levels of estrogen and other hormones in a drop of blood.
Aneeve Nanotechnologies was created as part of the "technology incubator" program launched by the University of California at Los Angeles. The company is working on creating cheap sensors that can be produced using conventional inkjet printers and carbon nanotubes. The principle of operation of such a sensor is that interaction with a hormone, for example, estrogen, will change the conductivity and optical properties of a nanotube chip applied using a printer, which at the same time will emit radio waves recorded by another device.
The figure shows microchips (on the left), on the surface of which a layer of carbon nanotubes is applied using an inkjet printer (on the right).
Kosmas Galatsis, Chief Operating Officer of the company, stated that the ultimate goal is to create devices whose usability is comparable to the convenience of using glucose meters, which at one time revolutionized the treatment of diabetes.
To date, there is no easy-to-use and inexpensive method of monitoring the hormonal level of female hormones. When conducting clinical trials or, for example, monitoring hormonal rhythms, doctors are forced to take blood from women daily or even twice a day for analysis. To apply the new method, it will be enough for a woman to prick her finger and place a drop of blood on a disposable test strip.
The new method can help couples who have problems with conception. They will be able to track changes in their hormonal background for several months and select the most favorable periods for conception. Another promising prospect is the use of a new method to study the processes occurring in a woman's body at the onset of menopause, which will determine the need for hormone replacement therapy in each case.
The developers note that monitoring of hormonal levels is only one of the possible applications of the technology they offer, which can be used to manufacture sensors of almost any type.
The choice of the developers fell on estrogen and other sex hormones due to the existence of an urgent need for such "hormone meters". The existing prototype of the sensor registers estrogen, but the accuracy of determination is currently limited to nanograms per milliliter, whereas to obtain a reliable result when using one drop of blood, the accuracy should be three orders of magnitude higher (picograms per milliliter).
Eventually, the developers plan to create a device that will read data from test strips and transfer them to the smartphone's memory in the form of an easy-to-read graph. They hope to get the first functioning prototype of the test system in a year and a half.
Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of TechnologyReview: Using Printed Nanocircuits to Sense Hormones
18.01.2010