Timothy Cornell, MD and Katsuo Kurabayashi, Ph.D.
There are over 5 million intensive care unit admissions per year in the U.S. Approximately 4 million of these patients will experience some degree of immune dysfunction, the most severe of which is ‘cytokine release syndrome’ (CRS). Severe CRS results in rapid hemodynamic instability, and ultimately multisystem organ failure. There are specific therapeutics to down-regulate each of the cytokines, but due to the limited ability to rapidly measure serum cytokines, they are typically administered without knowledge of individual cytokine levels. This approach has lead to variable impact on clinical outcomes. Therefore, clinicians need near real-time serum cytokine values to institute and monitor personalized anti-cytokine therapies.
The MicroKine team have developed a proprietary label-free and antibody-based microfluidic plasmon resonance sensor platform that enables, rapid (<30 min), sensitive quantification (dynamic range 10 – 10,000 pg/mL) of multiple (> 6 analytes) serum cytokines in small blood volumes (< 5 μL). Side-by-side comparison to the well-established enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), has shown the current MicroKine lab-grade prototype to be more sensitive, have a greater dynamic range by roughly two orders of magnitude, require smaller sample, and most importantly to provide results on the order of minutes rather than hours. By providing rapid information to physicians about individual immune response mediator levels (e.g. TNF-1 , IL-11 and IL-6, the targets of etanercept, anakinra and tocilizumab) MicroKine may help make existing treatments for CRS more targeted and effective, enhance clinical trial designs and allow for stratification of subjects.
The MicroKine team consists of pediatric intensive care physician Timothy Cornell, MD, and engineering professor Katsuo Kurabayashi, PhD, and their colleagues. Over the course of this year (2015-2016) participating in the Coulter program, they are developing a mass producible MicroKine device, validating it using clinical samples, and exploring the path to market. Once established for intensive care – an inexpensive disposable device such as the MicroKine chip could also find utility in less time-intensive applications such as monitoring cytokine levels in rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
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