Measurement of neuropeptides in clinical samples using chip-based immunoaffinity capillary electrophoresis

The current interest in micro-fabrication has extended to the clinical arena where there is a growing lobby for promoting these for point-of-care purposes. The advantages of such devices are their relative speed of analysis, lower reagent costs, and their application to clinical screening and diagnosis. Two chip-based capillary electrophoresis systems have been designed and their performance evaluated for rapidly measuring the concentrations of inflammatory neuropeptides in tissue fluids of patients with neuropeptide-associated muscle pain. Both chips were manufactured to fit a commercially available chip electrophoresis system. One chip was designed to perform electrokinetic flow immunoassays while the other utilized an immunoaffinity port, containing an array of immobilized antibodies, to capture the analytes of interest. Comparison of the results to commercially available high-sensitivity immunoassays demonstrated that both chip-based systems could provide a relatively fast, accurate procedure for studying inflammatory biomarkers in complex biological fluids. However, the immunoaffinity capture system proved the superior of the two chips. Using this system, twelve different inflammation-associated mediators could be determined in approximately 2 min as compared to 30 min when using the flow immunoassay chip. With the ever-expanding array of antibodies that are commercially available, this chip-based system can be applied to a wide variety of different analyses.