I’m curious about how far the whole blood diagnostics division has gone with creating a miniaturized kit. As heart disease continues to be America’s number one killer, cholesterol is constantly being monitored in most adults. So why are there no at home cholesterol detection kits? In fact, there are a few, but most doctors don’t recommend that you use these. Most medical professionals claim that these kits are unreliable, and often inaccurate, and they only tell you the total cholesterol level, which is useful but not all that informative. The problem is that these kits can’t differentiate between high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and cannot detect the triglyceride levels in blood plasma, all of which are found in a typical cholesterol blood test. Other than the problem with removing the plasma from a whole blood sample, I would think it would be relatively easy to separate these two types of lipoproteins and a glycol molecule in a microfluidic system. They have different functions, different sizes and therefore are comprised of different protein structures. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) has shown that it can separate different bacteria because they are comprised of different proteins and thus have different permitivities. I would think that these molecules would also have different DEP characteristics and could easily be separated in a similar fashion. So the question again becomes, why has no one developed a reliable cholesterol detection kit?