A rapid diagnostic technology for isolating rare blood group patients under medical emergency using a three-fold paper-polymer microfluidic kit

Abstract

Patients under medical emergency may require urgent blood transfusion as life-saving measures, including the situations demanding for operative intervention. However, while traditional blood grouping is an established practice before such procedures are administered, possibilities of having rare blood groups (like Bombay factor/hh group) remain to be undetected. Unfortunately, such rare blood groups may trigger adverse haemolytic reactions post the intervention, disrupting the success of blood transfusion, organ transplantation, and in vitro fertilization process-flow, among others. Currently, the established option for isolating such patients is to carry out elaborate DNA sequencing, albeit only after they start presenting life-threatening symptoms that may be difficult to arrest, whereas any approach of detecting such patients a-priori remains to be introduced. Here, we report the development of an affordable three-fold test kit that integrates the isolation and purification of the DNA sample from few drops of blood (∼70 microliter), perform its isothermal amplification and arrive at a rapid readout that is agnostic to any colorimetric inference. We demonstrate the efficacy of this methodology in a portable, user-friendly and inexpensive sample-to-answer framework that is amenable for execution at the patient’s site without demanding laboratory-centric procedures, within about 30 min of sample dispensing. The favourable sensitivity and specificity of the technology presents it as a value proposition for routine screening prior to administering blood-group sensitive clinical procedures – a paradigm that has thus far not been reported.