New device developed by University of Chicago scientists could find medical answers without blood tests

CBS News

22-05-2025

A lot of people don't like getting their blood drawn, but it is often the only way to obtain medical answers.
But scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a device that could obtain medical results without needles.
The device is called the airborne biomarker localization engine, or ABLE. Researchers say the device could detect airborne viruses or bacteria in hospitals or public spaces — and thus improve neonatal care, or allow people with diabetes to get a reading on their blood glucose levels just with their breath rather than a finger stick.
Professor Bozhi Tian of the University of Chicago explained that the ABLE works through the simple process of changing the state of matter. For generations, the best way to detect molecules has been through liquids such as blood — and even rapid COVID tests involve using droplets of liquid.
Looking for particles in the air is much harder because they're so diffuse, but the ABLE has a solution for that, Tian said.
"So imagine you have very diluted molecules in air that regular sensors find hard to detect because they are too thinly spread," he said. "Now our device, our ABLE device, solves this problem by cooling the air to turn water vapor into droplets — like how dew forms on a cold window. So this process collects and also concentrates these airborne molecules into the water droplets, making them easier to detect with simple tests, or sensors that are already available, such as the color-changing strips."
The new device created by scientists at the University of Chicago to detect molecules in air samples. The technology could one day be used to diagnose a wide array of diseases.
Bozhi Tian
Tian said the device uses a special water-repellent, or superhydrophobic, surface so the droplets can bounce and be collected.
"This can increase the sensitivity by thousands to millions of times compared to the regular gas sensors," he said.
Tian said he was first inspired to get started on the project when he visited the Stephen Family Neonatal Intensive Care unit at UChicago's Comer Children's Hospital right after the COVID pandemic.
He said he thought, "After seeing those preterm babies struggling, I started to ask myself, as a material scientist, can I actually design some gentle and no-contact sensors to monitor the health — without adding stress or discomfort to the preterm infants?"
Tian said he was also inspired by some examples in nature of organisms that use a water-repellent surface to capture liquid from the environment.
"For example, some desert beetles, they actually survive by capturing some tiny droplets of moisture from fog — utilizing their very unique and highly water-repellent surface," he said. "Now, another example could be a lotus leaf. The lotus leaves remain clean and also dry, despite this constant exposure to water. And this is because of remarkable super-hydrophobic textures Now, inspired by those ingenious biological designs, we adopted the concept of the superhydrophobic surface to have this condensation system for sensors."
Researchers hope the ABLE can optimize care for premature infants without blood tests or other invasive means. There could be numerous other uses, but UChicago noted that the ability to detect airborne molecules in this fashion is so new that scientists don't yet know what molecules they should be looking for.
The group is now working with a doctor who treats inflammatory bowel disease, UChicago said. IBD patients may have markers of inflammation in their breath that the ABLE could detect.
Mechanical engineer Jingcheng Ma, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame who worked on the study, also noted that implications of the ABLE when it comes to revealing new principles of physics.
"This work might start many new studies on how these airborne impurities affects phase change behaviors, for example, and the new physics can be used for many applications," Ma said in a UChicago News story by Louise Lerner.
The co-authors of the study on the ABLE also included UChicago scientists Megan Laune, Pengju Li, Jing Lu, Jiping Yue, Yueyue Yu, Jessica Cleary, Kaitlyn Oliphant, and Zachary Kessler.