Objective
To develop a device to immediately detect the angiogenin level of burn blister fluids for assessment of the burn depth.
Material and Methods
Blister fluids were blindly collected individually from intact blisters within the first few days post injury before the burn depth identification. To detect the presence of the angiogenin in burn blister fluids, we developed a multi-step procedure to carry out P-ELISA, a useful procedure for detecting specific antigens using a piece of filter paper. All colorimetric results were scanned via either a high-resolution scanner or camera, and the analyzed using Photoshop. The identified angiogenin level of burn fluids by P-ELISA was compared to those found by conventional ELISA.
Results
We detected the angiogenin level of the blister fluid from burn patients using our P-ELISA system. The relative intensity of the angiogenin concentration was significantly higher in burn fluids than in the serum of the healthy subjects. A positive correlation between the titer of the commercial ELISA kit and the relative intensity of our P-ELISA was observed.
Conclusions
We have attempted to develop the rapid P-ELISA procedure to detect the angiogenin level of patients with the different disease types. Our approach compared to the conventional ELISA procedure has several advantages such as the less operation duration (less than one hour), and the fewer clinical sample (two microliters). We believe that the approach that we have developed in this study has a wind range of the potential applications in both academic and commercial communities such as the point-of-care diagnostic device for wound healing monitoring, i.e., integrating our P-ELISA procedure to be a single diagnostic device.

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