Washington, April 1 : A handheld instrument to assess dental disease in minutes has been found to be effective in a pilot study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan.

The instrument, developed by Sandia National Laboratories, can determine whether a patient has gum disease, and quantitatively how advanced the disease is.

The disease can be diagnosed within some minutes by testing a tiny sample of saliva alone.

“The gold standard for any medical test is when instruments are used to examine human patients. The pilot study allowed us to compare our results to accepted clinical measurements. Then we could statistically validate both the periodontal disease biomarker and the new microfluidic instrument,” says Sandia researcher Amy Herr.

“We achieved faster and more reproducible results because we combined steps that ordinarily require time-consuming manual handling by many people, into a single automated device,” added the researcher

Since the amount of sample fluid needed for testing is very small, Herr sees further applications in other disease areas, including potentially improved diagnosis of prostate and breast cancer and rapid measurements of serum in animal models employed in vaccine development research.

“We’ve filed patents and technical advances to protect the work. The study has sparked commercial and university interest in our inventions. Our team - an interdisciplinary group of internal and external collaborators - believes Sandia’s contributions in this area could advance personalized medicine. So we’re motivated to extend the limits of Sandia’s lab-on-a-chip tools,” Herr says.

While components of the saliva-detection technique were reported earlier by Sandia, this is the first comprehensive study of Sandia’s integrated clinical method.

“Biomedical researchers have suspected that changes in the amount or type of proteins present may be useful as biological markers in disease diagnosis. Our current work with a particular enzyme in saliva supports that hypothesis regarding periodontal disease,” says Herr.

“Periodontitis can be episodic in nature. You need to know the stage of disease progression to diagnose and treat the illness most effectively. The enzyme [biomarker] that we monitored decreased or stabilized if the treatment was working well,” adds the researcher. (ANI)