If an asthma patient is suffering from rhinitis, urticaria like diseases and hence is facing diagnosis problems with the prevailing skin prick test, here is good news for him. An advanced molecular chip test facility for the detection of all kinds of allergies through microarray technology has begun in the Pink City for the first time.
“A molecular chip allergy test based on microarray technology has been installed recently to get 100 percent accuracy in results and repeatability of the tests at Asthma Bhawan, an NGO supported hospital,” Dr Nishtha Singh, its Executive Director and Chest Consultant, told SNS.
The molecular chip is like a strip of testing blood sugar by putting a drop of blood and inserting into a small glucometer and gets the result, said Dr Nishtha, adding in the new allergy test method, it is ‘One Chip, One patient’ in which ‘3 ml blood’ would give 300 tests in five to six hours procedure.
“The Skin Prick Test which is the most common allergy test available till now has many pros and cons while looking at the results especially ‘repeatability’ of test was not possible and the exact cause of allergy was sometime uncertain and lengthy,” Dr Singh, who has performed about 100 molecular chip tests of allergy related patients visiting from across the state.
Microarray technology is a general laboratory approach that involves binding an array of thousands to millions of known nucleic acid fragments to a solid surface, referred to as a ‘chip’. The chip is then bathed with DNA or RNA isolated from the study sample (such as cells or tissue), Dr Nishtha elaborated