Development of a Whole Blood Paper-Based Device for Phenylalanine Detection in the Context of PKU Therapy Monitoring

Robert Robinson; Liam Wong; Raymond J Monnat; Elain Fu

doi:10.3390/mi7020028

Development of a Whole Blood Paper-Based Device for Phenylalanine Detection in the Context of PKU Therapy Monitoring

Micromachines (Basel). 2016 Feb 15;7(2):28. doi: 10.3390/mi7020028.

Authors

Robert Robinson¹, Liam Wong², Raymond J Monnat³, Elain Fu⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. robinrob@oregonstate.edu.
² School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. wonglia@oregonstate.edu.
³ Departments of Pathology and Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. monnat@u.washington.edu.
⁴ School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. elain.fu@oregonstate.edu.

Abstract

Laboratory-based testing does not allow for the sufficiently rapid return of data to enable optimal therapeutic monitoring of patients with metabolic diseases such as phenylketonuria (PKU). The typical turn-around time of several days for current laboratory-based testing is too slow to be practically useful for effective monitoring or optimizing therapy. This report describes the development of a rapid, paper-based, point-of-care device for phenylalanine detection using a small volume (40 μL) of whole blood. The quantitative resolution and reproducibility of this device with instrumented readout are described, together with the potential use of this device for point-of-care monitoring by PKU patients.

Keywords: colorimetric readout; paper-based device; phenylalanine detection; phenylketonuria; whole-blood assay.