The nanoneedle salt stress test – too good a clue to leave abandoned on the lab bench?

A new announcement on this joint MEA/MERUK project today:

MERUK said:
ME Research UK and the ME Association are excited to build on our October 2023 partnership, when we jointly funded a 12-month study exploring electrical differences in blood cells from people with ME/CFS.

This next phase of funding will refine and expand the initial work, giving us deeper insights into the biology of ME/CFS and moving us closer to a reliable and low-cost diagnostic test.

The study builds on initial findings in 2019 by Professor Ron Davis and his team from America, who developed a nanoelectronics test which could detect an impedance in white blood cells taken from people with ME/CFS.

The new grant has been awarded to Dr Fatima Labeed (United Arab Emirates University), who authored the initial research, and Dr Jacqueline Cliff, who will host the work in her laboratory at Brunel University of London.
Click to expand...

This is the nanoneedle, right? I'd thought this whole enterprise had gone down the plug at some point but apparently not!
 
Sasha said:
A new announcement on this joint MEA/MERUK project today:



This is the nanoneedle, right? I'd thought this whole enterprise had gone down the plug at some point but apparently not!
Click to expand...
Its based on the nanoneedle. MEResearch funded some work that replicated the nanoneedle finding and then there was a further piece of work by a PHD who looked at the electricial properties of cells without the the need for the nanoneedle component and found a similar effect but much cheaper to run. I believe this is a follow on to that work rather than the replication of the nanoneedle although its all connected together because its all the same type of finding.
 
BrightCandle said:
Its based on the nanoneedle.
Click to expand...

I think it might be better described as inpired by the nanoneedle work. I could never see how the nanoneedle system could tell us anything much about electrical properties of cells of actual biological interest. The system seemed to have been developed to test impedance of solutions. But the work done more recently by Labeed did seem more relevant. Whether it 'replicates' I am not sure, but it looked worth following up.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I think it might be better described as inpired by the nanoneedle work. I could never see how the nanoneedle system could tell us anything much about electrical properties of cells of actual biological interest. The system seemed to have been developed to test impedance of solutions. But the work done more recently by Labeed did seem more relevant. Whether it 'replicates' I am not sure, but it looked worth following up.
Click to expand...
But if a statistically significant difference had been shown in cell impedances between healthy controls and ME/CFS patients, even if the reasons for those differences are not yet known, does that not at least demonstrate there may be something worth trying to understand better?
 
Barry said:
But if a statistically significant difference had been shown in cell impedances between healthy controls and ME/CFS patients, even if the reasons for those differences are not yet known, does that not at least demonstrate there may be something worth trying to understand better?
Click to expand...
Definitely, even if it's just to better understand flaws in the measurement process that led to a misleading difference. You have to identify instrumentation error before you can eliminate it.

In this sort of situation, I depend on the researchers to judge the strength of the finding. Are they convinced that it is a valid difference, or do they think it might be measurement error. One might be worth betting their careers on, the other might lead to saying "We can't get funding for more development" while they switch to some other study. Working with nanoneedles doesn't seem like a billlion-dollar endeavor. Given the pace of nanotech development, the cost of duplicating the study has probably dropped a lot already. You might even be able to order custom nanoneedle patches or probes at reasonable cost from some nanofab company.

The main problem is that doing this sort of project doesn't offer huge profit potential. Cold fusion got lots of people trying to duplicate the setup.
 
My impression was that the nanoneedle was actually measuring across distances too small to tell us anything about the cell itself - just the outside surface, if that. The Labeed system at least looked to measure electrical propertie acroos the cell membrane.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top