A $2 egg-beater could save lives in developing countries, according to a report from the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry. A piece of inexpensive plastic tubing taped to a handheld egg-whisk could be used as an ad hoc centrifuge for separating out blood plasma in a matter of minutes and allow life-saving diagnostic medical tests to be carried out much faster and at far less cost than with conventional lab-based centrifuge equipment.
George Whitesides and colleagues at Harvard University, USA, say the plasma obtained is easily good enough to use in tests to detect diseases such as Hepatitis B and cysticercosis, a parasitic infection of the nervous system.
“The object was to separate serum [plasma] from blood using readily-obtained materials in a resource-constrained environment,” explains Whitesides. The equipment can be bought from shops for around two dollars. It needs no special training to use, no electricity or maintenance, and can be sterilised with boiling water and reused. The user can even prepare several samples at once – just by taping more lengths of tubing to the beater.
This simple DIY approach to diagnostics contrasts starkly with the bulky, and fragile commercial centrifuges, that cost thousands of dollars and require extensive operator training. Given that it is Blog Action Day on poverty, it is rather timely that this new, simple technology is announced today.
“This technique is simple and works remarkably well,” says Doug Weibel, an expert in microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US. “This technique complements several other ‘simple solutions’ that the Whitesides group has developed to tackle point-of-care diagnostics in resource-poor settings.”
Amy P. Wong, Malancha Gupta, Sergey S. Shevkoplyas, George M. Whitesides (2008). Egg beater as centrifuge: isolating human blood plasma from whole blood in resource-poor settings Lab on a Chip DOI: 10.1039/b809830c
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