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The boxes arrive from Japan, full of what lookย like packing peanuts.ย But these white oblong shapes arenโt there just to protect some other cargo. These are silkworm cocoons. Snip them open, throw out the brownish grub inside, boil down the casing, and you are left with a near-magical material.
David Kaplan has used silk to make vaccines and antibody drugsย that donโt need to be refrigerated. And now, in a paperย published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, theย Tufts University bioengineer and his colleagues have shown that silk could be used to preserve blood samples at room, or even body temperatures.
โWeโre still a ways away from having a viable technology that can be brought to the patientโs doorstep,โ said Roger Peck, a diagnostics specialist at the global health nonprofit PATH.ย But, he noted, the technology could make diagnostic tests more accessible to rural communities โ and potentially more accurate.
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Jonathan Kluge used to work at Tuftsย and isย now director ofย R&D at Vaxess Technologies, a company thatย spun out ofย Kaplanโs lab. Back when he was still in academia, he and his lab matesย created both a silk powder and a silk solution. Theyย mixed theseย substances with blood, let the mixtures dry, and found that even at high temperatures, the silk-preserved blood still yielded almost all of the proteins more reliably than either frozen blood samples or dried blood spots.
Read full, original post:ย Silk could transform the blood-testing business
