New device detects heart disease using less than one drop of blood
Monday, June 1, 2009 - 09:35
in Health & Medicine
Testing people for heart disease might be just a finger prick away thanks to a new credit card-sized device created by a team of researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities in Boston. In a research report published online in The FASEB Journal, they describe how this device can measure and collect a type of cells needed to build vascular tissue, called endothelial progenitor cells, using only 200 microliters of blood. The development is also significant because it allows scientists to collect these cells much more easily than current techniques allow, bringing laboratory-created tissue for vascular bypass surgeries another step closer to reality.