Project description
An easier and faster method of screening babies for treatable conditions
Newborn screening (NBS) identifies treatable conditions that can impact a child’s health and survival. Many countries follow this strategy as a means of prevention or early treatment. The EU-funded SPOTplasma project proposes to develop novel methodologies that allow for more efficient, cheaper and faster ways to perform NBS. The team is interested in developing both mass spectrometry and ion mobility spectrometry-based approaches for low-cost, readily available instrumentation even for countries with limited access to the NBS required infrastructure. The project will promote dried blood spots as a sample of choice as they are an easy way of collecting, shipping and storing blood samples.
Objective
The need and importance of newborn screening (NBS) is a reality in most of the western countries. NBS helps with the detection and prevention of important health issues during neonates first days of life, avoiding growth or mental retardation or even potential deaths. Even when each individual disorder has a low incidence into the population, their cumulative occurrence is relatively high, around 1 in 1,500 to 1 in 5,000. Most of the NBS programs in western countries are well established but there is a constant need for new methodologies that can tackle more efficient, cheaper, faster, and simpler ways to analyze different disorders. SPOTplasma will help to address innovative methodologies for NBS. Firstly, the project will tackle the idea of unaltered NBS sample analysis with no sample or minimal preparation steps considered as a kind of “Holy grail” for precious samples. And secondly, during SPOTplasma a platform based on ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) will be investigated as an alternative for newborn screening in developing countries, barely implemented due to the lack of well-equipped infrastructures in their public system along with the high costs associated with MS instrumentation. In conclusion, SPOTplasma will address dried blood spot (DBS) analysis by developing analytical tools that can speed up the screening process or cheapen the analysis. Novel methodologies based on a flexible Tube Micro Plasma (FμTP) coupled to mass spectrometry (MS) and stand-alone IMS are proposed for DBS analysis not only for NBS but also in the pharmacological industry.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
23071 Jaen
Spain