Chip Identifies Patients with Severe Form of Lupus

A grid-like array of short pieces of a disease-associated protein was synthesized on silicon chips normally used in computer microprocessors

Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine (Stanford, CA, USA) and Intel Corp. (Santa Clara; CA, USA) collaborated to create the chip through a process used to make semiconductors, and were able to identify patients with a particularly severe form of the autoimmune disease lupus.

The new technology is currently focused on research applications but it has the potential to eventually improve diagnoses of many diseases, as well as to rapidly determine the drugs most effective for a particular patient. It may also speed drug development by enabling researchers to better understand how proteins interact in the body.

“When I see patients in the clinic right now, I may know they have arthritis, but I don’t know which of the 20 or 30 types of the disease they have,” said associate professor of medicine Paul (P.J.) Utz, MD, noting that existing methods can take days or even weeks to answer such questions. “Now we can measure thousands of protein interactions at a time, integrate this information to diagnose the disease and even determine how severe it may be. We may soon be able to do this routinely while the patient is still in the physician’s office.”

Prof. Utz is a cosenior author of the research, published online August 19, 2012, in Nature Medicine.

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Stanford University School of Medicine
Intel Corp.