Standardization of hapten delivery in the diagnosis of allergic contact dermatitis.

News About this Project

• Publication: Standardizing the Delivery of 20 μL during Patch Testing: Dermatitis, 27(5):272-5: (October 2016)
• Publication: Journal Cover Photo: Dermatitis: (October 2016)

Project Overview

The goal of this project is to create a device that standardizes the volume of hapten that is delivered to patients when testing for allergic contact dermatitis. The current procedure for applying a patch test which contains the haptens to patients is to load the haptens onto an aluminum Finn chamber by hand. Then the patch is secured onto a patient's back. There are specific amounts of hapten that should be loaded onto the chambers depending on the medium that the haptens are in. Due to human error in manually loading the haptens onto the chambers, there is a variation in the amount of haptens each patient is exposed to. If there is not enough hapten on a Finn chamber, the tests can come back as a false negative since the amount of allergen that the patient was exposed to was not enough to cause a visible reaction. If too much hapten is on the Finn chamber, the hapten can spill over into the neighboring chamber. This could cause false positive tests if the patient was allergic to the hapten that spilled over, but not the hapten that got contaminated. The variations in tests lead to question the validity of patch testing with haptens. Therefore,there is a need for a device that standardizes the volume of hapten delivered.

Team Picture

Contact Information

Team Members

• Kari Stauss - Team Leader
• Alexandra Picard - Communicator
• Andrea Doll - BSAC
• Katrina Strobush - BWIG
• Lauren Taylor - BPAG

Advisor and Client

• Prof. Randolph Ashton - Advisor
• Dr. Margo Reeder - Client