Chip promises better diagnosis for common blood disorder
Rebecca Hersher
For more than fifty years, blood smear tests for sickle cell disease have been the standard diagnostic tool for physicians. But the tests, which show whether the patient’s red blood cells have an abnormal form of the iron-carrying protein hemoglobin that will cause them to take on a crescent shape in response to low oxygen levels in the blood, fails to predict the severity of symptoms. It is a large diagnostic loophole, considering the symptoms of sickle cell disease, which affects more than 13