Description :  

Many portable medical testing and monitoring devices have been developed to meet the needs of manned space exploration.  As man ventures further from Earth, to Mars and beyond, more complex and comprehensive medical testing devices will be necessary as returning as astronaut to Earth quickly for medical treatment will not be possible.  Tests to measure the concentrations of a wide variety of proteins, amino acids, and other compounds in the blood are among the most routinely performed for medical diagnoses.  The equipment commonly used to perform these chemical analyses is very large (>1000 lbs), expensive (tens of thousands of dollars), and requires highly trained personnel to operate.  It would be desirable to have a small, portable, low-cost device or devices to perform such clinically important blood chemistry analyses in a spacecraft.

HPLC is one of the most widely used analytical techniques both for clinical applications and for an array of other analytical applications.  HPLC can be broken down into two main processes: separation and detection.  A mixture such as blood serum, or anything else containing the analyte of interest, is first fed into the HPLC column.  The components of this mobile phase are separated in the HPLC column as a result of differing chemical affinities between those components and the surface of the column and/or its packing, the stationary phase.  This separation is necessary as it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish similar compounds without it.  Once separated, a variety of methods can be employed to detect the analytes of interest in the mobile phase.  The most common detection technique used with conventional HPLC is UV/V spectroscopy. 

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Principal Investigator:  Gold, Scott  --  Chemical Engineering

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Collaborators:  

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Funding Agencies:  NASA thru LaSPACE

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Amount Awarded:  $5,000

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Start Period:  08/15/2005

End Period:  08/14/2006