What if you could avoid the hassle of transporting a blood sample and move the data instead?
Wouldn’t this enable new ways of looking at health, lifestyle, and other changes and help extensive data collection more analogously to what wearables do today?
Here’s how we partnered with Matt Dyer, Life Science industry expert, and World Marathon runner, to test this hypothesis with the MiniQES Bioanalytical Platform.
A little Background
Running a marathon takes a toll on your body. Running a marathon every day, seven days in a row, on seven different continents… can take an extreme toll. Yet, that toll opens doors for an opportunity to learn more about human biology and physical exhaustion.
But here’s the problem. Biological systems are very complex and highly dynamic. They respond directly to the changes brought on by the impacts of the runner’s travel schedule, physical activity, nutrition, etc. For example, the World Marathon Challenge has seven days of extreme physical impact. Measuring the body’s preparedness or response before and while recovering after the race presents us with a challenge.
The Challenge: Sample Collection & Time Dimension
The complication resides upstream of the scientific insight and the data, with the need for repeated blood sample collection. The individual should travel to a clinic, access a phlebotomist, and provide a volume of blood that prohibits the needed frequent collections.
To cope with that problem, biomedical researchers frequently decide to eliminate the “time” dimension. Therefore, when studying environmental or disease impact on an individual, researchers usually take a single “snapshot” to simplify that experimental complexity.
Is micro-sampling and transport to High-Complexity Labs The Best Solution?
But last week, researchers from the prestigious Snyder Lab in Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine demonstrated that finger-prick blood collection could be effectively implemented and used to enable sampling frequencies on the timescale of minutes without needing clinical access (1).
These samples are then transported to a high-complexity lab where a team of scientists will use complex preparation protocols and expensive high-resolution instruments to measure the molecular symphony occurring in response to the ingestion of a mixed meal shake or normal daily fluctuations. In this work, Stanford researchers measure hundreds of thousands of molecules including several proteins, lipids, metabolites, hormones, and inflammation signals.
But what if we could eliminate the burden of sample transport and complex preparation?
Video on the top depict how simple is to load a sample into MiniQES
At Probius, we are fueling data acquisition by making it simple, we have created a technology called QES (Quantum electrochemical Spectroscopy). QES enables the identification and measurement of molecules like inflammation proteins, metabolites and cells via a fundamental and intrinsic property, their vibrational frequency.
This novel technology enables a very easy data acquisition closer to the sample collection, without the need for sample transport, extensive expertise or complex instrumentation.
Can We Simplify Data Acquisition?
At Probius, we are fueling data acquisition by making it simple, we have created a technology called QES (Quantum electrochemical Spectroscopy). QES enables the identification and measurement of molecules like inflammation proteins, metabolites and cells via a fundamental and intrinsic property, their vibrational frequency.
This novel technology enables a very easy data acquisition closer to the sample collection, without the need for sample transport, extensive expertise or complex instrumentation.
A new challenge: Testing MiniQES simplicity and Robustness
Which brings us back to the World Marathon Challenge.
To test the robustness and simple operation of the MiniQES instrument, we partnered with life sciences industry’s expert Matt Dyer.
Matt has extensive experience developing and launching easy to use small platforms and is running the World Marathon Challenge.
The World Marathon Challenge consists of runners taking on seven marathons, which they run in seven different continents across seven consecutive days.
Matt will be carrying around the MiniQES instrument, and stress test our sample acquisition process from a drop of blood before and after the race(s). Once he is back (and exhausted), we will ask him about his experience with the MiniQES platform
We will also extract the data generated to learn more about the response of his body to this extreme physical and mental challenge!
But in the meantime, if you want to see how the MiniQES platform can enable longitudinal sample collection and understand a little bit more about molecular vibrations, click below.
References:
Shen, X., Kellogg, R., Panyard, D.J. et al. Multi-omics microsampling for the profiling of lifestyle-associated changes in health. Nat. Biomed. Eng (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-022-00999-8