BioCDs could allow for rapid disease tests

May 20, 2004 | Source: KurzweilAI

While-you-wait medical tests that screen patients for thousands of disease markers by detecting proteins could be possible with “BioCDs” –compact-disc technology patented by a team of Purdue University scientists led by physicist David D. Nolte.

CDs ordinarily store digital information as billions of tiny “pits” in their surface. The test transforms these into miniature test tubes that can hold a trace quantity of a chemical that reacts to a certain protein found in the blood. The concentration of certain proteins in the bloodstream can indicate the onset of many diseases; BioCDs could offer a cheap and fast method of detecting these biological molecules.

Each pit is only a few micrometers in diameter, but it could hold many thousands of individual detector molecules, each of which could pair up with and bond to a single protein molecule. These chemical changes could then be read with laser technology similar to what is found in conventional CD players.

Nolte said the advantages to using BioCDs rather than other nascent detection technology, such as biochips, would be in the number of molecules the discs could screen for, as well as simplicity and price.

Purdue news release