A Basque consortium made up by CIC microGUNE, the BioDonostia Institute and the companies Proteomika and Abyntek within the Progenika Group works on the development of a sensing microdevice to monitor the evolution of self-immune and chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis or psoriasis.

The inflammatory activity can be directly measured in the patient's blood; this may enable specific drug dosage, thus minimising side-effects and improving the control of health care expenditure.

One of the clinical parameters used to study the progress of these diseases is the concentration of C reactive protein in blood. However, the main factor influencing the development of the inflammatory activity is the Tumour Necrosis Factor (TNF) alpha protein, often produced by the organism as a response to the disease.

Nowadays the determination of TNF-alpha is not common in any hospital worldwide, since there are no viable techniques within the daily medical practice. Consequently, the search for a new method enabling TNF-alpha determination in daily clinical practice is of great sanitary and economic interest. Such device will provide the doctor with reliable data and the necessary information to customise each patient's treatment.

Researchers expect to have a prototype available in 2011. It will be tested on real samples from patients by the end of that year. These TNF-alpha related studies are co-funded by the Basque Government and the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.