Blood cell counting is the most powerful and widespread approach for assessing an individual’s health status. The diagnosis and monitoring of an infection (e.g. in HIV, malaria, bacterial infection), the monitor of a chemotherapy outcome in cancer patients or even the diagnosis of rare diseases (e.g. sickle cell disease), relies on counting different types of blood cells (white blood cells (WBCs), neutrophils, CD4+T cells, etc). We developed an image-based, cell counting platform that can be used to diagnose and monitor diseases at the point-of-care. The platform consists of a portable, optical microscanner and a disposable, glass, microfluidic chip. We characterized the platform with finger-pricked, whole blood obtained from healthy volunteers. Our experimental results indicate that our platform is capable of capturing and identifying/counting WBCs with high (>95%) efficiency proving that the technology has commercialization potential. Capturing efficiency of CD4+T cells was slightly lower (~80%). The operation of the platform will need to be automated in order to be used reliably at the point-of-care.
We also performed market analysis to identify the clinical application with the most significant socioeconomic impact. The analysis indicated that monitoring cancer patients on chemotherapy (by counting WBCs and neutrophils) should be the point of market entry (1 million cancer patients in Europe and the United States receive chemotherapy each year). The market size was estimated at 0.25 Billion U.S. dollars. If successfully commercialized, the proposed technology will dramatically improve the medical condition of cancer patients as it will enable them to frequently monitor the chemotherapy outcome in order to avoid live-threating side effects and to optimize the chemotherapy benefits.
