Dan Ratner, Univ. of Washington Treated paper can be used to do medical tests. Here, a biomolecule printed in the pattern of the UW mascot binds to a toxic molecule, showing that the toxin is present.
Posted under: Engineering , Health and Medicine , News Releases , Research , Science , Technology. A current focus in global health research is to make medical tests that are not just cheap, but virtually free. One such strategy is to start with paper - one of humanity's oldest technologies - and build a device like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other diseases. A University of Washington bioengineer recently developed a way to make regular paper stick to medically interesting molecules. The work produced a chemical trick to make paper-based diagnostics using plain paper, the kind found at office supply stores around the world. "We wanted to go for the simplest, cheapest starting material, and give it more capability,” said Daniel Ratner , a UW assistant professor of bioengineering and lead author of the paper recently published in the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir. "We also wanted to make the system as independent of the end applications as possible, something any researcher could plug into.
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