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Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

Interview excerpt: diagnostics in space
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:02:31
Publish Date: 2016-11-29 18:00:00
Description: With so little room for a diagnostic lab, what happens when an astronaut gets ill in space? And what if we could even prevent a medical issue from happening? In this interview excerpt, Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes a revolutionary, small handheld diagnostic device that can work with three different sample streams. Have a listen: Transcript: "So, one of the problems for space exploration is that there's limited room to take a lot of equipment in a diagnostic laboratory with you, and have it on, say the Space Station, or as you move to explore someplace like Mars. And so what we've been working on, is developing a small handheld diagnostic device that's kind of revolutionary in the fact that it can work with different types of sample streams to do both analytical diagnostics of health, and do differential blood cell counts because combined, those two things can give you a lot of information about your current health status; if you're pre-symptomatic to something, or if you're developing somewhere along your progression to a diseased state. So, in our case, we're actually working on three different sample types. Two are non-invasive. So one is saliva, and the other one is actually breath. So, small volatiles in breath, can actually diagnose something about whether you have diabetes. It's much like a breathalyzer that the police use to know if you've been drinking. We can measure those small molecules in your breath, but also breath has a liquid component. It's called breath condensate. And that breath condensate can have some of the same proteins you find in blood and in saliva, that can also be used to diagnose health. So we can find proteins that are related to cancer or cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and even infection within that condensate. So then the third sample we're looking at is blood, because blood is the clinical standard, which all the doctors use. When you go to the doctor, you know they always take a small tube of 3 ml. to 5 ml. of blood and they're going to count your blood cells and be able to relate that to, whether you have anemia, even if you possibly have cancer, and your general health status based on measuring protein biomarkers or proteins in your blood as well. Right? So you get your HDL measurement, that's done through a diagnostic kit called an ELISA to measure some specific proteins in your blood. And so we're going to provide one single device that can measure all three of those sample streams, and tell you something about proteins, your blood differentials, and what's in your breath." Related content: https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/biodetection_space https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/biodetection_device
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