Umut Gurkan, PhD and an international team of clinicians and researchers made the cover of The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Analyst. Paper-based microchip electrophoresis for point-of-care hemoglobin testing describes HemeChip, the first miniaturized, paper-based, microchip electrophoresis platform for identifying the most common hemoglobin variants (S, C, and E) easily and affordably at the point-of-care in low-resource settings.

HemeChip test works with a drop of blood and the system guides the user step-by-step through the test procedure with animated on-screen instructions. Hemoglobin identification and quantification is automatically performed, and hemoglobin types and percentages are displayed in an easily understandable, objective way. HemeChip shows feasibility and high accuracy via testing 768 subjects by clinical sites in the United States, Central India, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. HemeChip correctly identified all subjects with hemoglobin S, C, and E variants with 100% sensitivity, and displayed an overall diagnostic accuracy of 98.4% in comparison to reference standard methods. HemeChip is a versatile, mass-producible microchip electrophoresis platform that addresses a major unmet need of decentralized hemoglobin analysis in resource-limited settings.