A new blood test can employ a sole plasma sample to evaluate health and forecast the chances of getting a series of diseases. This is due to Theranos, which might sound recognizable, but unlike that disaster, this proof-of-concept is supported by study posted in Nature Medicine.
The research, spearheaded by researchers at Cambridge University, UC San Francisco, and SomaLogic (the Colorado-located biotech firm), examines plasma for a broad series of proteins. The tech looks out for plasma for aptamers, pieces of DNA that connect to a specific protein. Only particular fragments connect to specific proteins, so by looking out for aptamers, scientists can decide which proteins are there and in what quantity.
That data is then fed into ML algorithms and employed to forecast things such as the risk of patient in getting cardiovascular disease or diabetes. It is still early for this proof-of-concept, but the group of scientists thinks that, as the tech enhances and becomes more reasonably-priced, it can assist physicians operate a comprehensive health check, employing only one blood sample. They are dubbing it as a “liquid health check.”
Various other blood tests calculate plasma for investigative proteins. A team of researchers at IBM is operating on a blood test that looks out for a peptide dubbed as amyloid-beta, related to Alzheimer’s, and employs machine learning to forecast risk factors of a person. Scientists have employed blood tests to make a diagnosis of the level of concussions (on the basis of the attendance of 2 brain proteins UCH-L1 and GFAP) and design cheap TB tests (that examine the concentration of an anti-TB antibody and 4 proteins in samples of blood). In theory, looking out for aptamers can let scientists to forecast more diseases via only one blood sample.