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Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups
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Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups
Hosted by Robert Michel
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UK Researchers Create Conductive Thread That Can Be Woven into Clothing to Monitor Key Health Biomarkers

Sep 15, 2023 | Instruments & Equipment, International Laboratory News, International Laboratory News, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Resources, Laboratory Testing, Precision Medicine

Meet ‘PECOTEX,’ a newly-invented cotton thread with up to 10 sensors that is washable. Its developers hope it can help doctors diagnosis disease and enable patients to monitor their health conditions

Wearable biosensors continue to be an exciting area of research and product development. The latest development in wearable biosensors comes from a team of scientists led by Imperial College London. This team created a conductive cotton thread that can be woven onto T-shirts, textiles, and face masks and used to monitor key biosignatures like heart rate, respiratory rate, and ammonia levels.

Clinical laboratory managers and pathologists should also take note that this wearable technology also can be used to diagnose and track diseases and improve the monitoring of sleep, exercise, and stress, according to an Imperial College London news release.

Should this technology make it into daily use, it might be an opportunity for clinical laboratories to collect diagnostic and health-monitoring data to add to the patient’s full record of lab test results. In turn, clinical pathologists could use that data to add value when consulting with referring physicians and their patients.

The researchers published their findings in the journal Materials Today titled, “PEDOT:PSS-modified Cotton Conductive Thread for Mass Manufacturing of Textile-Based Electrical Wearable Sensors by Computerized Embroidery.”

“Our research opens up exciting possibilities for wearable sensors in everyday clothing,” said Firat Güder, PhD, Principal Investigator and Chief Engineer at Güder Research Group at Imperial College London, in a news release. “By monitoring breathing, heart rate, and gases, they can already be seamlessly integrated, and might even be able to help diagnose and monitor treatments of disease in the future.” (Photo copyright: Wikipedia.)

Ushering in New Generation of Wearable Health Sensors

The researchers dubbed their new sensor thread PECOTEX. It’s a polystyrene sulfonate-modified cotton conductive thread that can incorporate more than 10 sensors into cloth surfaces, costs a mere 15 cents/meter (slightly over 39 inches), and is machine washable.

“PECOTEX is high-performing, strong, and adaptable to different needs,” stated Firat Güder, PhD, Principal Investigator and Chief Engineer at Güder Research Group, Imperial College London, in the press release.

“It’s readily scalable, meaning we can produce large volumes inexpensively using both domestic and industrial computerized embroidery machines,” he added.

The material is less breakable and more conductive than conventional conductive threads, which allows for more layers to be embroidered on top of each other to develop more complex sensors. The embroidered sensors retain the intrinsic values of the cloth items, such as wearability, breathability, and the feel on the skin. PECOTEX is also compatible with computerized embroidery machines used in the textile industry.

The researchers embroidered the sensors into T-shirts to track heart activity, into a face mask to monitor breathing, and into other textiles to monitor gases in the body like ammonia which could help detect issues with liver and kidney function, according to the news release.

“The flexible medium of clothing means our sensors have a wide range of applications,” said Fahad Alshabouna, a PhD candidate at Imperial College’s Department of Bioengineering and lead author of the study in the news release. “They’re also relatively easy to produce which means we could scale up manufacturing and usher in a new generation of wearables in clothing.”

Uses for PECOTEX Outside of Healthcare

The team plans on exploring new applications for PECOTEX, such as energy storage, energy harvesting, and biochemical testing for personalized medicine. They are also seeking partners for commercialization of the product.

“We demonstrated applications in monitoring cardiac activity and breathing, and sensing gases,” Fahad added. “Future potential applications include diagnosing and monitoring disease and treatment, monitoring the body during exercise, sleep, and stress, and use in batteries, heaters, and anti-static clothing.”

In addition to Imperial College London, the research was funded by the Saudi Ministry of Education, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Cytiva Life Sciences, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US Army.

Other Wearable Biometric Sensors

Dark Daily has covered the development of many wearable health sensors in past ebriefings.

In “UC San Diego Engineers Develop Microneedle Wearable Patch That Measures Glucose, Alcohol, Muscle Fatigue in Real Time,” we covered how “lab-on-the-skin” multi-tasking microneedle sensors like the one developed at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Center for Wearable Sensors to track multiple biomarkers in interstitial fluid were finding their way into chronic disease monitoring and sample collecting for clinical laboratory testing.

In “Fitbit Receives FDA Approval for a Wearable Device App That Detects Atrial Fibrillation,” we reported how personal fitness technology company Fitbit had received 510(k) clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as Conformité Européenne (CE marking) in the European Union, for its Sense smartwatch electrocardiogram app that monitors wearers’ heart rhythms for atrial fibrillation (AFib).

And in “Researchers in Japan Have Developed a ‘Smart’ Diaper Equipped with a Self-powered Biosensor That Can Monitor Blood Glucose Levels in Adults,” we reported how researchers at Tokyo University of Science (TUS) had created a self-powered, glucose-testing diaper that utilizes a biofuel cell to detect the presence of urine and measure its glucose concentration.

Wearable Sensors in Personalized Healthcare

Wearable healthcare devices have enormous potential to perform monitoring for diagnostic, therapeutic, and rehabilitation purposes and support precision medicine.

Further studies and clinical trials need to occur before PECOTEX will be ready for mass consumer use. Nevertheless, it could lead to new categories of inexpensive, wearable sensors that can be integrated into everyday clothes to provide data about an individual’s health and wellbeing.

If this technology makes it to clinical use, it could provide an opportunity for clinical laboratories to collect diagnostic data for patient records and help healthcare professionals track their patients’ medical conditions. 

—JP Schlingman

Related Information:

Sensors Embedded into T-Shirts and Face Masks Could Monitor Biosignatures

PEDOT:PSS-modified Cotton Conductive Thread for Mass Manufacturing of Textile-based Electrical Wearable Sensors by Computerized Embroidery

Wearable Sensors Styled into T-shirts and Face Masks

Low-Cost Sensor Tracks Vital Signs and Breath to Monitor Diseases

Sensor Thread

Wearable Sensor

UC San Diego Engineers Develop Microneedle Wearable Patch That Measures Glucose, Alcohol, Muscle Fatigue in Real Time

Fitbit Receives FDA Approval for a Wearable Device App That Detects Atrial Fibrillation

Researchers in Japan Have Developed a ‘Smart’ Diaper Equipped with a Self-powered Biosensor That Can Monitor Blood Glucose Levels in Adults

Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Fund Open-Source Global Disease Tracker; May Be Useful Resource for Microbiology Laboratories

Dec 17, 2018 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations

Cloud-based platform—IDseq—shows potential to track the causes and spread of infectious diseases worldwide using metagenomic data Here’s the latest example of how big data and related technologies can give physicians—as well as microbiologists and clinical pathologists—a new tool for understanding infectious disease and tracking outbreaks anywhere in the world. This project is being funded and organized by well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The project is known as IDseq. It was announced recently in a press release issued by Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (CZ Biohub), Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. IDseq is a platform designed to support global disease surveillance and prevention. It will make use of gene sequencing and analysis of metagenomic data. This data will be made accessible to the global medical community. The system leverages the power of cloud computing to streamline the process of transmitting and analyzing metagenomic data, as well as sharing results with other platform users. “That will be incredibly valuable. Information sharing is one of the most powerful public-health interventions in an outbreak,” Jennifer Gardy, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of British Columbia, told The Atlantic. Designed by Engineers to Be Easily Used by Healthcare Providers and Medical Laboratory Technicians   Coverage in The Atlantic notes that IDseq isn’t the first tool to offer similar features. Joseph DeRisi, PhD, a biochemist at the University of California San Francisco and co-president of CZ Biohub, states, however, that IDseq is one of the first designed by a large team of engineers, security experts, and other tech and medical researchers. Many tools see their origins in academic research and are less friendly to those without advanced academic expertise. The research team’s goal, according to DeRisi, is for IDseq “To enable people in under-resourced areas to do what we’ve been trying to do in San Francisco.”

“It’s easy for us to sit in our labs dreaming up tools and platforms,” Jennifer Gardy, PhD (above), an epidemiologist at the University of British Columbia, told The Atlantic. “But we need to make sure we’re designing them in a way that makes sense to the doctors, nurses, lab techs, and epidemiologists out there in an outbreak.” (Photo copyright: Michelle Thorpe/University of British Columbia.)

Two Trials Show Promise for IDseq Use While the software is already available for free as a collection of open source tools, the IDseq platform is now in a “soft launch” phase. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding training for clinicians at CZ Biohub’s labs in San Francisco through its Grand Challenges Explorations Initiative. However, the platform has already achieved success in two noted scenarios—one at Dhaka Shishu Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and another in Tororo District Hospital in Uganda. Both used the system to analyze the samples of children admitted for fevers for which they found no known cause. In the Dhaka cases, Senjuti Saha, PhD, a microbiologist from Child Health Research Foundation, used the platform to trace unexplained cases of meningitis to an earlier chikungunya virus outbreak. Saha explained to The Atlantic that her colleagues previously thought chikungunya could not cause meningitis. The platform found otherwise, allowing her to analyze a further 478 samples and detect an additional 17 cases of potential chikungunya-related meningitis. In the Uganda cases, the researchers used metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) data and the IDseq platform to investigate unknown causes of fever in children. “As progress is made toward elimination of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, it will be increasingly important to understand the landscape of pathogens that account for the remaining burden of morbidity and mortality,” researchers state in their study, currently in early access at bioRxiv. “The use of mNGS can contribute importantly to this understanding, offering unbiased identification of infecting pathogens.” Wide-Spread Use of IDseq Not Without Challenges While an article in Medium by Charles de Bourcy, PhD, Software Engineer at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, outlines how the IDseq platform can process up to 480GB in approximately 10 minutes, it doesn’t account for the initial data input, which can be daunting. For areas with weak infrastructure and/or slow connection speeds, this could add significant delays as medical laboratories and healthcare workers at remote sites attempt to transfer data to the nearest IDseq-enabled location. Saha told The Atlantic, “If the transfer is too slow or the data too large, we just [ship] hard drives.” Sequencing requirements create additional concerns. Bulky equipment and the skills required to run sequencers could limit the ability to use the IDseq platform to analyze and share results. Clinicians might also face difficulties in sourcing sequencing reagents due to customs and supply chain concerns. Finally, the platform still requires an expert to interpret findings. “IDseq is an excellent tool, but it needs to be paired with people who have substantive knowledge to guide its use,” Saha told The Atlantic. Regardless of these issues, Saha believes IDseq can help remote/resource-challenged medical labs chase diseases. “It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it means that groups like ours don’t have to spend time to build up [sequencing] capacity. And anything is better than nothing.” IDseq might offer an excellent opportunity for microbiology laboratories, clinical laboratories, and medical researchers around the world to share data surrounding outbreaks, track disease on global and community level, and better determine the strains and probable sources of infectious diseases.

—Jon Stone

Related Information: Chan, Zuckerberg and the Gates Foundation Unveil Open-Source Global Infectious Disease Tracker IDseq: An Open Source Platform for Infectious Disease Detectives Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Announce First-of-Its-Kind “IDseq” Platform and Service to Enable Real-Time Global Disease Surveillance and Prevention A Simpler Way to Get to the Bottom of Mysterious Illnesses in Poor Countries Etiology of Fever in Ugandan Children: Identification of Microbial Pathogens Using Metagenomic Next-Generation Sequencing and IDseq, a Platform for Unbiased Metagenomic Analysis  

Potential New Clinical Laboratory Urine Test for TB Could Speed Up Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease That Kills 1.7 Million People Each Year

Mar 12, 2018 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Testing

Public health agencies and physicians would gain access to accurate, rapid dip-stick test that could give results similar to a pregnancy test

Tuberculosis is a major killer that ranks alongside HIV/AIDS as a leading cause of death worldwide. This deadly disease takes the lives of more than a million people each year. And, unfortunately, traditional medical laboratory testing using X-rays, blood/skin/sputum specimens, or the new molecular diagnostic systems can be time consuming and expensive.

Now, scientists at George Mason University (GMU) in Virginia have developed a urine test for tuberculosis (TB) that could lead to a dip-stick technology that would accurately and rapidly diagnose the deadly lung disease. Similar to a pregnancy test, if successfully developed for use in clinical settings, the dip-stick could not only enable public health agencies to test for TB more effectively, but also allow primary care physicians and other doctors to easily test their patients for TB at the point of care. However, it also could mean clinical laboratories might find their participation.

Nearly All TB Deaths Occur in Resource Strapped Areas

Such a breakthrough would certainly be a boon to public health and global healthcare, especially in resource strapped areas of the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 95% of the 1.7 million TB deaths each year occur in low- and middle-income countries. This is one reason why an inexpensive and easy-to-use detection method for diagnosing the lung disease has long been sought. TB is curable, particularly if diagnosed early.

With that goal in mind, an international team led by Alessandra Luchini, PhD, Associate Professor at GMU, and Lance Liotta, PhD, MD, co-director and co-founder of the GMU Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, developed the potentially revolutionary urine test that uses nanotechnology to measure a sugar molecule in urine that identifies TB with a high degree of accuracy. The scientists published their results in Science Translational Magazine.

George Mason University scientists Alessandra Luchini, PhD

George Mason University scientists Alessandra Luchini, PhD (above left), and Lance Liotta, MD, PhD (above right), head an international team that has developed a nanotechnology that may lead to a simple dipstick urine test to detect tuberculosis. Such a test could greatly impact medical laboratories by reducing the need for traditional lab tests. (Photo copyrights: George Mason University.)

While past attempts at developing an accurate urine test for TB failed to reliably detect low concentrations of the sugar entity lipoarabinomannan (LAM) in HIV-negative, TB-infected patients, the GMU team developed a technology capable of doing so.

According to New Scientist, the GMU team’s test “uses tiny molecular cages embedded with a special dye that can catch and trap these sugar molecules. This makes the test capable of detecting the sugar at low concentrations, making the technique as much as 1,000 times more accurate [than] previous methods for detecting TB in urine.”

“We can measure now what could never be measured before,” Liotta noted in a news release.

World Health Organization Recommends Not Using Serodiagnostic Blood Tests

Common methods to detect TB currently include microscopy of sputum samples—a fast and accurate but expensive detection method (that also can diagnosis drug resistant disease)—or a skin test. A third test for TB, an Interferon-Gamma Release Assay, provides results in less than 24 hours but cannot distinguish between active and latent infection. In 2011, the WHO issued a Policy Recommendation urging countries to stop using serodiagnostic blood tests to diagnose TB, calling these tests unreliable and inaccurate. X-rays, meanwhile, detect only advanced lung damage.

In the GMU study, 48 Peruvian patients were chosen, all with active pulmonary TB, none of whom was infected with HIV or previously had received treatment for TB. According to the research, TB infections were detected with greater than 95% sensitivity, with TB-positive, HIV-negative patients having detectably higher concentrations of LAM in their urine compared to the controls. Patients who had more advanced disease also had elevated LAM concentrations. Eight of nine patients who were smear-negative and culture-positive for TB tested positive for urinary LAM.

“The technology can be configured in a variety of formats to detect a panel of previously undetectable very-low-abundance TB urinary analytes … This technology has broad implications for pulmonary TB screening, transmission control, and treatment management for HIV-negative patients,” the study’s authors told Science.

While The Scientist reports the GMU urine test gives results in about 12 hours, Luchini’s goal is for that timeframe to be dramatically shortened as the test is refined.

“We showed that our technology could be used to measure several different kinds of markers for TB in the urine and could be configured as a rapid test similar to a pregnancy test,” Luchini said in a GMU news release.

According to the university, GMU researchers will continue their work in Peru, where students will begin testing hundreds of patients as part of a research study. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are funding their work. Luchini told New Scientist her goal is to make their TB urine test easier to use and to test it on thousands more people.

If successful, she predicts the test could be commercially available for physicians and clinical laboratories to use within three years. GMU’s biotechnology partner Ceres Nanosciences will be commercializing the technology, with the aim of making the test available worldwide, the university said in a statement.

—Andrea Downing Peck

Related Information:

TB, or Not TB? At Last, a Urine Test Can Diagnose It Quickly

Urine Lipoarabinomannan Glycan in HIV-Negative Patients with Pulmonary Tuberculosis Correlates with Disease Severity

Mason Scientists Develop Nanotechnology-based Urine Test that Could Lead to Early TB Detection

Urine Test for TB Yields Results in 12 Hours

Tuberculosis Serodiagnostic Tests Policy Statement 2011

Tuberculosis Mortality Nearly Halved Since 1990

Tuberculosis Fact Sheet

Harvard University Researchers Turn Bubble Wrap into Tiny Test Tubes that Could Be Used for Clinical Pathology Laboratory Testing in Developing Nations

Jul 8, 2015 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Testing

Inexpensive packing material pops up as an alternative to high-cost glass lab equipment for simple diagnostic tests, a potential boon in developing nations

By turning Bubble Wrap into a cheap alternative to glass test tubes and culture dishes, Harvard University scientists may have found a way to cushion clinical laboratories in developing countries from the high cost of basic lab gear.

This latest discovery is significant because it adds to the growing number of in vitro diagnostic testing systems that potentially can generate results as accurate as those produced in today’s state-of-the-art medical laboratories, but at a much lower cost. (more…)

China’s Genome-Mapping Giant BGI Is Poised to Become an International Leader in Gene Sequencing and May Play Major Role in Interpretation of Genetic Test Results

Apr 6, 2015 | Digital Pathology, Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology

However, China has a shortage of well-trained pathologists, which is why some American lab organizations are establishing medical lab testing ventures in China

If experts are right, a company in China is poised to become the world’s largest at gene sequencing. In addition, the huge volume of genetic data it generates is expected to give this company the world’s largest database of genetic information.

Such developments could mean that, in just a few years, many pathologists and molecular Ph.D.s in the United States will be accessing this trove of genetic data as they conduct research to identify new biomarkers or work with clinical specimens.

The company at the center of all this attention is genome-sequencing giant BGI, located in Shenzhen, China. It owns 230 of the largest, high-throughput gene-sequencing machines and wants to become the world’s largest genome-mapping company. (more…)

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