ChamPArray

Fast and accurate diagnoses - directly from the doctor.
Bacterial urinary tract infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Doctors often dispense with microbiological diagnostics because they are still very time-consuming and cost-intensive and instead prescribe standard antibiotics. However, as pathogens increasingly develop resistance to these therapeutics, these therapies are increasingly ineffective. If a harmless urinary tract infection develops into a serious and painful inflammation of the renal pelvis as a result of ineffective treatment, this may even require hospitalisation. The costs for the health care system in these cases are many times higher than the usual costs of a urinary tract infection.
To refrain from microbiological diagnostics for reasons of time and cost could be a thing of the past in a few years. Developers worldwide are in the process of developing handy analytical devices that can be used to diagnose diseases quickly, accurately and inexpensively. Bacterial or viral pathogens are often detected using their genetic material, which is very specific in parts and can be unambiguously classified. The differences are extremely difficult to prove as they are present at the molecular level. In addition, the pathogens are tiny bacteria that have to be detected as early as possible, while the number of detectable germs is still very low. For this reason, strategies that specifically multiply the relevant areas of the genetic material are frequently used for detection purposes. At the same time, these areas are provided with measurable markers that glow, for example, as soon as they are irradiated with light. These strategies are effective, but analyses could be enormously shortened if the genetic material could be detected directly without prior multiplication. This is the aim of the ChamPArray project. With the channel multidimensional particle array, molecules of bacterial genetic material in microfluidic cartridge systems can be detected quickly and highly sensitively, but without duplication steps and thus also without labelling. The approach is based on a particle-based high-throughput method that is compatible with microfluidic chips.
A decisive disadvantage of conventional microarray technology is the long incubation time of up to twelve hours. Since only a small part of the ligands actually bind to capture molecules on the chip, the sensitivity of conventional microarrays is limited. The ChamPArray is intended to overcome these serious and fundamental disadvantages of microarray technology. This is a preliminary scientific project with potential for use in many portable diagnostic systems.