Novel Reagent-less Protein Detection Using Nanotechnology

Health care and medical intervention during missions, particularly those of extended duration, can be improved using medical instruments, which allow in flight specimen analysis of blood proteins. Current technologies based upon ELISAs can not meet NASA needs as it only quantitate a single protein at a time. Due to the complicated procedure for antibody immobilization, limited stability, and poor compatibility for biological materials have strongly diminished the apparent attraction of immuno-sensors. Other newly emerging techniques in the field of proteiomics depend upon mass spectrometry methods thus require extensive laboratory support and equipment. These limitations could be overcome by using artificial receptors, which mimic the active sites of antibodies. During the Phase I, Lynntech has prepared sensor elements capable of recognizing different proteins selectively from complex biological samples. Results obtained in Phase I have demonstrated the feasibility of miniatuarization of this technology with minimal power requirements. The proposed research will result in a light weight, hand held device capable of specific recognition of small concentrations of target proteins from biological fluids at the end of Phase II and will be delivered to NASA/JSC. The rapid and simultaneous quantitation of a large number of proteins in biological fluids will become a valuable tool in clinical diagnostics.