NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – With funding from the European Union, a team of researchers in Europe have embarked on a project to develop a test for the early detection of sepsis.
Teesside University in the UK announced the project dubbed CE-microArray today. It includes eight other European academic and industry partners and has a total cost of about €1.6 million ($2.2 million), of which the European funding agency CORDIS is providing a little more than €1.1 million.
According to the CE-microArray homepage, the project will use "existing technology from clinical chemistry, microplate readers, and cavity-enhanced spectroscopy … to develop [a] more sensitive, accurate, faster, and more useful diagnostic platform."
It added, "The project aims to produce a solution based on colorimetric detection that will be up to 100 times more sensitive, reducing the damage to patients with sepsis, [and will] allow sensitive and accurate detection of an increased range of biomarkers at lower cost and higher throughput."
Meez Islam, a reader in physical chemistry in the School of Science & Engineering at Teesside University, is coordinating CE-microArray.
"We've seen that this testing can work in specialized cases, and anything that can speed up the diagnosis times and start treatment earlier, even by a small amount, could potentially save thousands of lives each year," he said in a statement.