Sickle cell disease affects millions of people of many nationalities throughout the world, including both children and adults. A major challenge in managing the disease is the tremendous pain that patients endure from chronic and acute pain episodes called pain crisis. Unfortunately, these pain episodes are unpredictable and patients never know when or where these episodes will take place.
Current methods to detect and monitor sickle cell disease rely mainly on optical microscopy, which is time-consuming, causes delays in capturing important changes, and moreover, does not capture changes in real-time. Morphological changes due to repeated cell sickling events may lead to permanent cell damage. To effectively manage sickle cell disease, time is of the essence.
Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science have developed a rapid and reliable new method to continuously monitor sickle cell disease using a microfluidics-based electrical impedance sensor. Results of the study, published in the American Chemical Society’s journal ACS Sensors, show that this novel technology can characterize the dynamic cell sickling and unsickling processes in sickle blood without the use of microscopic imaging or biochemical markers.
With this method, Sarah E. Du, Ph.D., senior author and an assistant professor in FAU’s Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering, and co-authors from FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science and the University of Miami, were able to characterize the rate of cell sickling and the percentage of sickled cells, which are important contributing factors of abnormal blood flow and sickle cell vaso-occlusion. Vaso-occlusion causes acute pain in patients due to altered forms of hemoglobin.
Findings from the study show that simultaneous microscopic imaging of morphological changes in the cell demonstrated the reliability and repeatability of the electrical impedance-based measurements of cell sickling and unsickling processes.
In the study, the researchers also established the correlations between the in vitro measurements and the patients’ hematological parameters, such as the levels of sickle hemoglobin (HbS) and fetal hemoglobin (HbF). These findings show a potential clinical relevance because it serves as a proof-of-concept of electrical impedance as a label-free, biophysical marker of cell sickling events as well as a sensitive tool for probing the dynamic cellular and subcellular processes beyond the optical microscopy. The developed electrical impedance sensor may potentially be used for assessing vaso-occlusion risk, disease severity, and therapeutic treatment in sickle cell disease.
