IIT Jodhpur develops nanosensor to detect cytokines, track disease progress

Jodhpur: Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur researchers have developed a nanosensor that helps in the quick detection of cytokines, a group of proteins that regulate various cells. The project aims to reduce the mortality rate due to delayed diagnosis and a lack of early warnings.

The technology also has immense potential as a rapid and point-of-care technique for health monitoring, disease diagnosis, prognosis, and immune response tracking.

Biomarkers of inflammation

Cytokines are one of the many biomarkers of inflammation used for diagnosing diseases and tracking their progression. They play an important role in tissue damage repair, cancer development and progression, and modulating immune reactions, important for developing precision medicine and targeted therapeutics for various conditions like oncology, infectiology and rheumatological diseases, among others.

Meet the team

The work was published by B Akilandeshwari, Department of Bioscience and Bioengineering, Sarvar Singh, Department of Electrical Engineering, Prof Ajay Agarwal, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, and Prof Sushmita Jha, Department of Bioscience and Bioengineering at IIT Jodhpur as a conference proceeding of 2023 IEEE Applied Sensing Conference (APSCON).

Clinical trials soon

Talking about the technique and its future, Prof Ajay Agarwal said, “This technique currently in its development stage has provided exciting and encouraging results for three biomarkers i.e. interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin-β (IL-β), and TNF-α, the key pro-inflammatory cytokines released by inflammatory cells. As of now, the testing is done for controlled samples. The team aims to take the technology to clinical trials soon. The group is also using this technique to develop detection protocols for the early-stage and quick diagnosis of Sepsis and Fungal infections.”

This novel sensor developed at IIT Jodhpur uses Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy to detect analytes even at low concentrations, is based on semiconductor process technology and works on the principle of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS).

Hence, it makes this technique powerful and capable of detecting trace-level molecules with high precision and selectivity.

‘Better than ELISA and PCR’

Currently, the most widely used techniques for cytokine detection are enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the team said.

These methods are reliable but highly time-consuming, requiring trained personnel and a long sample preparation or analysis time of over six hours. However, the sensor developed by IIT Jodhpur takes only 30 minutes and is cost-effective.

The developed sensor, a rapid and selective diagnostic technique, is used in conjunction with AI for quick and accurate data processing and analysis. By getting a faster and more robust diagnosis of a person’s autoimmune diseases and bacterial infections, this sensor possesses the capability to transform a patient’s medical treatment. This way, a patient’s disease can be diagnosed and tracked promptly to guide the future course of treating them.