U.K. Lab Spin Off Creates Athletic Testing Device

(Southcom.mil)

UK Sport, the national development organization for elite athletes in the U.K., has agreed to use a new hand-held medical device to help improve athletes’ training programs. The device is made by Argento Diagnostics, a company spun off fron the National Physical Laboratory, the country’s national institute for standards and measurements.

The Argento Diagnostics device is a hand-held reader and analyzer of bodily fluid samples that monitors various proteins. These proteins, called biomarkers, reveal details about the condition of the body before, during and after training sessions, and offer indicators of the athletes’ physical health and effectiveness of their training programs. For elite level athletes, even small changes in fitness can mean the difference between success and failure.

Most biomarker analyses today are carried out at centralized laboratories, but the slow turn around time, sending samples from weight room or track to a distant lab, limits the value of these tests.

Argento Diagnostics developed a diagnostic technology to solve this and other problems associated with slow clinical lab results. Argento’s hand-held device provides a diagnosis from single small samples of blood, urine, or saliva, returning results within minutes. The faster results can also identify injuries or medical conditions, to enable immediate treatment before long-term damage can be done, and increase the chance of a quick recovery.

Argento’s portable device uses nanotechnology to analyze the samples. Samples are mixed with silver nanoparticles coated with a binding unit, an antibody, against a specific biological compound, the biomarker that acts as an indicator of the tested condition. If the biomarker is present, the silver nanoparticles stick to magnetic beads that sandwich the biomarkers.

Magnets then pull these compounds into the device’s measurement zone, where the silver nanoparticles are removed, then drawn down to the sensor for measurement. The number of nanoparticles measured by the sensor will be directly proportional to the expressed amount of biomarker/compound. The device can then analyze the biomarker level and present the results on the device’s computer screen.

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