Next generation point-of-care test for therapeutic drug monitoring of adalimumab in patients diagnosed with autoimmune diseases

Abstract

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of adalimumab (ADM) at the point-of-care (POC) is key to prevent loss of response but has not been accomplished to date because true POC testing solutions are still lacking. Here, we present a novel “whole blood in – result out” self-powered microfluidic chip for detecting ADM within 30 min to enable TDM at POC. Hereto, we first demonstrated on-chip plasma separation from whole blood, followed by downscaling an ADM ELISA with maintained specificity and sensitivity in plasma. This assay was then performed on a robust and easy-to-use microfluidic chip we designed based on (i)SIMPLE technology, allowing autonomous function upon single finger press activation, which was successfully validated with patient samples. Herein, we prove the potential of our technology to detect targets starting from whole blood introduced directly on-chip and to integrate various immunoassays, both for TDM and other in vitro diagnostics applications, like infectious diseases.