Debashis Chanda, PhD, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida talks about working towards a simple blood test that could detect brain disorders.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in May 2019.
Tell me about how the idea of this technology came about.
CHANDA: We are working on various biosenses in the last four or five years. The goal was to see whether we can use light to detect some molecules that are changing the body parameters. So we started with some basic molecules like protein detection at the beginning and then it took us time to calibrate and stabilize the system, improved the performance, improved the sensitivity. But then we are looking for a more challenging problem which has more direct relevance and that lead us to this work where we are looking to detect an important neurotransmitter called dopamine. And the next challenge to us too can we detect the dopamine directly from the blood. The goal was to see if we can monitor brain activity just through the blood test.
And why is there such a need for that.
CHANDA: A huge portion of our population suffers from various neural or brain disorders, all kinds of Alzheimer, Parkinson’s, depression, many neural disorder which need to be monitored periodically. And at this moment, there is no blood test which can do that job. We have to go through complicated MRI testing which are not very doable on a regular basis. Our plan is to do more of a sensing platform like the way you detect or monitor your blood sugar or blood glucose level. Same way we can monitor your neurotransmitter level and try to correlate that with some brain neural activity or brain disorder.
And would you say that this would be more useful in the diagnosis or at the monitoring of somebody?
CHANDA: I think both actually because diagnosing the first steps means we would want to detect how small and how early you can detect change. So that’s the diagnostic part and the monitoring part is how this change happens from day to day. And with respect to say, medication, how does change impact the medication doses? We can actually adjust your medication based on your measurement of the neurotransmitter from the blood.
Could you go a little bit in a general sense of just dopamine itself; how are doctors or physicians currently using that to diagnose somebody?
CHANDA: Dopamine is one of the major and important neurotransmitters for brain activity. But there are many dopamine analytes are present also like L dopa by epinephrine. But dopamine measurement plays an important role for people suffering for Parkinson. So how do you adjust that person’s medication? Depends on the dopamine level on the brain. Monitoring dopamine kind of makes a lot of direct sense for the monitoring of the disease progression or healing or adjustment of the medicine from day to day.
What’s the science behind it? How is it able to detect for that in seconds versus the standard of hours?
CHANDA: Sure. The key first goal was to for us to create some kind of sensing platform in this case is a kind of nano patterned surface where we excite electrons and that’s called plasmons. Now the next step was to coat that surface with some material which can selectively bind or capture dopamine from the blood. We use the CDM oxide nanoparticle which actually can bind to dopamine. And the next third layer of us to use a medium, in this case blood, because we are detecting dopamine from blood. But now blood has many other particles like red blood cells, white blood cells. Our goal was to do a plasma separator – it means remove all of them and just have a plasma. It is difficult to sense a small molecule like dopamine. So you develop this on chip plasma separate and that includes a drop of blood and actually the chip itself separates plasma. And then when the plasma flows through that sodium oxide coated nano structure surface, dopamine selectively binds or gets captured by the surface. And then we are using an infrared light, which comes from the top and measures how much has been attached to the surface. So basically the binding on dopamine changes the light reflection from that nano structure plasma surface. So just by measuring the reflection of light we can measure the dopamine concentration in the blood.
And that takes seconds?
CHANDA: Yeah. Very quick measurement technique – within a few seconds of a seconds you can get everything done because light can read any surface very quickly.
And are there certain levels that would detect something like cancer or Parkinson’s? What are the levels?
CHANDA: Right. Dopamine concentration or similar neurotransmitter concentration change actually signifies as a various brain tumor. So we can correlate that that change of concentration with some carcinogenic activity which may going on in the brain. So that’s another aspect of it.
Is it the change difference that matters more, or is it the amount of levels?
CHANDA: I think the amount of level plays an important role and how quickly it is changing because how quickly means the progression of the disease. So that both need to be monitored.
What is the standard way that doctors and physicians would normally check for this?
CHANDA: So a lot of people do a test like a HPLC and Eliza test. Doctors typically do an Eliza HPLC kind of test which needs quite a significant amount of sample preparation pre processing to actually detect dopamine. Our goal was to develop what a simple stick technique just using light.
Are there any type of limitations to this?
CHANDA: We’ll be working on establishing the relation of dopamine concentration variation with a known thing, like people suffering from a severe level of depression. So what is that mapping? Like, what is the amount of dopamine or some similar neurotransmitter correlate with the particular disease. So that mapping is what needs to be developed. That’s got to be the focus because X amount of dopamine impacts a person’s neural activity or brain behavior. So that would be more of a mapping of concentration measurement and disease or the disorder.
And what implications do you believe this would have for the medical field?
CHANDA: We do have a big implication because people can monitor their many neutral or functioning which at this moment there is nothing at the customer level. Like I cannot do any brain monitoring at my home, if I want to. I can monitor blood sugar level at home, but not the brain. So I think that if this matures then we can establish our mapping between the neurotransmitter fluctuation in the blood with the neural activity in the brain then or any brain disorder. Then it will create a point of care kind of application where people can monitor themselves at home.
Would that be the end and purpose for you for this particular thing or is it more for clinical use? Is it more like customers themselves taking this at home or?
CHANDA: I think it could be both. One would be for a clinician to use a simple test to monitor, and then farther down the road it could be as a point of application where the patients can monitor themselves like blood glucose measurements at home.
And what are the next steps for this?
CHANDA: We are now focusing on sensitivity improvement – how small a change we can measure. Second we are trying to develop protocols to reduce false alarm because every sensing platform has some kind of false alarm – meaning a similar neurotransmitter with a similar molecular structure like dopamine, say for instance, will have a similar kind of response. This is trying to develop a protocol on how to eliminate or minimize false alarm. That would be our very next steps which we are working on now.
And how far way do you believe this would be from clinical use. Or at home?
CHANDA: I think we are in the academic bench level. I was talking to program managers and the funding agencies because we need a chunk of funding for the next level of research and development. And then it goes to a clinical trial and actual implementation. So that’s still a vat to cover and that’s what I think we are looking for. Are the research funding to develop the next phase of work.
Anything else you think people should know?
CHANDA: In general I think light plays a very important role. I envision that over time that we will be having many devices or many sensing platforms just based on optics and light, which will be able to monitor our health, monitoring our well-being. So that’s a vision where you can use even your cell phone for monitoring your body metrics for instance, just taking a picture. Having a spectrometer built into a cell phone that you can actually monitor your various volumetric parameters and monitor your health.
END OF INTERVIEW
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