Seated around the dinner table, faculty affiliated with Stanford ChEM-H – one of Stanford University’s interdisciplinary institutes – spoke one-by-one, pitching ideas for collaborative research.
Seated around the dinner table, faculty affiliated with Stanford ChEM-H – one of Stanford University’s interdisciplinary institutes – spoke one-by-one, pitching ideas for collaborative research. Inspired by a recent medical conundrum, Gilbert Chu, a professor of medicine (oncology) and of biochemistry at Stanford Medicine, put out the call for a chemist who could help him create a sensor that could quickly, easily and accurately measure ammonia levels in blood. Just down the table Matthew Kanan, associate professor of chemistry, registered an impressive coincidence: his graduate student, Thomas Veltman, was working on a sensor for measuring ammonia in any liquid.
In the August issue of ACS Sensors, Chu, Kanan, Veltman and colleagues Natalia Gomez-Ospina and Chun Tsai have published the product of their collaboration: a handheld, portable ammonia detector that – like glucometers used to measure blood sugar – assesses ammonia levels from a finger or earlobe prick.
Ammonia is a natural product of digestion that is usually processed into urea by the liver and passed out of the body in urine. Too much ammonia in the blood can cause mental and physical dysfunction and is a concern for people with liver disease or genetic conditions that hinder ammonia metabolism. The new device could be especially beneficial for newborns with these metabolic diseases. In this population, brain damage can occur within hours of elevated ammonia levels and, for treatment, some families must drive long distances to obtain adequate testing.
Read more at Stanford University
Image: A prototype of the handheld ammonia blood detector and associated test strips, developed by researchers at Stanford. CREDIT: Thomas Veltman
