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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Blood and urine tests play vital roles in modern medicine. Yet in vast regions of the world where refrigeration is not available, preserving samples for testing is virtually impossible. Now in a study appearing in ACS’ journal Chemistry of Materials, scientists report that encapsulating indicators of disease from samples in tiny metal-organic hybrid structures could help. They say finding could lead to better health care in resource-limited countries.
Clinical labs conduct more than 7 billion laboratory tests — many of them involving blood and urine — in the U.S. each year, according to the American Clinical Laboratory Association. However, without refrigeration, these samples degrade quickly and that can lead to testing errors. But in many parts of the world, refrigeration isn’t available and, as a result, blood and urine testing isn’t practical. Preservatives such as boric acid are only good for short-term storage, and dried blood samples are still difficult to implement in resource-limited areas and can result in aggregation. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous structures that can encapsulate and protect molecules, and in previous research, Srikanth Singamaneni and colleagues showed that MOFs can preserve proteins in biosensors. So, the team sought to overcome the challenges of sample degradation with MOFs.
The authors acknowledge funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Researchand the National Institutes of Health.