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Vibrational spectroscopy of biofluids for disease screening or diagnosis: translation from the laboratory to a clinical setting
Author(s) -
Mitchell Alana L.,
Gajjar Ketan B.,
Theophilou Georgios,
Martin Francis L.,
MartinHirsch Pierre L.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of biophotonics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.877
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1864-0648
pISSN - 1864-063X
DOI - 10.1002/jbio.201400018
Subject(s) - clinical practice , point of care , disease , point of care testing , computer science , intensive care medicine , population , medicine , medical physics , pathology , physical therapy , environmental health
There remains a need for objective and cost‐effective approaches capable of diagnosing early‐stage disease in point‐of‐care clinical settings. Given an increasingly ageing population resulting in a rising prevalence of chronic diseases, the need for screening to facilitate the personalising of therapies to prevent or slow down pathology development will increase. Such a tool needs to be robust but simple enough to be implemented into clinical practice. There is interest in extracting biomarkers from biofluids (e.g., plasma or serum); techniques based on vibrational spectroscopy provide an option. Sample preparation is minimal, techniques involved are relatively low‐cost, and data frameworks are available. This review explores the evidence supporting the applicability of vibrational spectroscopy to generate spectral biomarkers of disease in biofluids. We extend the inter‐disciplinary nature of this approach to hypothesise a microfluidic platform that could allow such measurements. With an appropriate lightsource, such engineering could revolutionize screening in the 21 st century. (© 2014 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)