A CMOS Chip NMR: The Next Generation of Molecular Phenotyping for Health and Disease

In the early 90’s, as the first human genome project was initiated, an extensive effort has been placed on mapping the role of genes in the onset of disease. Genetic contribution to different diseases however, were found to... [ view full abstract ]

In the early 90’s, as the first human genome project was initiated, an extensive effort has been placed on mapping the role of genes in the onset of disease. Genetic contribution to different diseases however, were found to be varies and often very little, with non-genetic factors (e.g., environmental hazards, diet, microbiome) having much greater attributable risks, and thereby producing ‘stochastically’ large phenotypic pool. The key goals to understanding human health and disease depend on the success of translating technological innovations (e.g., molecular diagnostic, molecular imaging) into medical research (and eventually into clinical settings), and the ability to access the ‘genotype-phenotype’ correlogram through various omics-platform (e.g., proteomic, metabolomics, phenomics).

Our research focuses addressing the challenges (and unprecedented opportunities) by introducing a new generation of molecular phenotyping by rapidly mapping out the water-protein interactions (thus providing an 'inverse proteomic' information) within the microenvironment of biological fluids (e.g., blood, serum). We demonstrated that highly unique and specific `molecular fingerprinting´ for disease diagnosis using a single drop of blood (<1µL) obtained in less than 10 minutes using our home-built portable NMR spectrometer. Some of our successful translational clinical works (and in the pipeline) includes the rapid and label-free malaria screening, rapid molecular phenotyping of oxidative stress in diabetes mellitus, and sub-stratification of endometriosis and molecular phenotyping in hemoglobinopathies. 

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