Will BioCDs Catch Our Diseases?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Strictly speaking, it's not about nanomedicine, but it's close enough, because it concerns our future, so I think it's appropriate to give you this kind of information. A revolution in medical testing will soon come to a doctor's office near you, thanks to a simple CD player. A team of Purdue University scientists led by physicist David Nolte devised a method to create analog CDs which will be able to screen thousands of proteins in your blood for potential diseases while you wait. You will no longer have to wait for weeks before getting the results provided by a specialized lab. Still, expect a few years before this technology comes to your physician's office. In "BioCDS could hit No. 1 on doctors' charts," Nolte says that "it will be at least 10 years before doctors have Bio-CDs at their disposal." You'll find more details, pictures and references in this overview."
May 25th, 2004 at 1:16 PM
Doubtful
I'm not buying it Roland. It sounds like they need to coat each track on the CD with a different antibody (or other blood-protein attracting chemical). That is very different from the process of imprinting a CD with a representation of digital information.
As pointed out "Each ring of pits, or 'track,' on the CD could be coated with a different protein,". Of course there is no discussion as to the cost of producing said proteins and or the limits with regard to applying them to the tracks on the CD. Of course one gets into questions about how the "master" would stamp the proteins onto the CD and/or how the proteins would individually be reapplied to the "master". Though I am not an expert in CD manufacturing I strongly suspect that with music it is a generally non-destructive process — i.e. each master can produce a large number of copies without degrading. The process described for BioCDS is inherently a destructive process — i.e. each copy made requires the transfer of proteins from the master to the copy. You would be lucky to get 5-10 copies per master and each subsequent copy would be degraded as the concentration of proteins was diminished. So the reliability of any test results from a BioCD would be questionable.
If one changes the CD manufacturing process so that one master is used per CD then one eliminates the cost advantages of CDs. I.e. the cost of each BioCD becomes very expensive.
So while the idea may be interesting the viability of its implementation is very questionable.
Also worthy of note — while there may be variations in blood chemistry for some diseases there may be other diseases which take place entirely within cells (and are not indicated by changes in blood chemistry). So it remains an open question what fraction of human diseases could be detected by BioCDs even if they could be developed.