Giving blood samples is one of the most routine tasks people are asked to perform to build a better picture of their health. But drawing enough of the life-sustaining liquid is a common challenge in the clinic, particularly among infants and the elderly.
Patients are often asked to return another day or must be poked multiple times during a visit to collect enough blood for proper analysis — hardly ideal for people receiving care or the health system.
Linh Tran, a biomedical engineering master's student in Dal's Frampton Lab, has spent two years seeking a solution that enables medical professionals to get the information they need without such complications. The platform she and research colleagues created centres around a simple idea: improving how much information can be gleaned from smaller blood samples.
Tran showcased her solution at the 2026 Falling Walls Lab Atlantic Canada competition earlier this month, emerging the overall winner for her three-minute presentation, Breaking the Wall of Sample Volume: Big Diagnostics from Tiny Volume.
Now she’s preparing to bring her award-winning research to the global stage during the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin this November, competing against 100 other emerging scientists from around the world. “It's an honour and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from, meet and talk with such dedicated researchers,” she says.
We caught up with Tran to learn more about her research and its potential impacts.
Your winning pitch focused on getting big diagnostic information from a very small blood sample. What inspired you to tackle this particular challenge and how has your idea evolved throughout your research journey?
It all started when I joined the Frampton Lab for my graduate degree. I was assigned the project because it connected closely with my background in microbiology and immunology. From that background, I knew that small blood samples are a real challenge in clinical settings, yet it's a problem people have simply learned to accept because it's so hard to get around. Patients may be asked to come back another day for a second draw or get poked multiple times at different sites in the hope of collecting enough blood.
Our lab has made major discoveries with aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS), a method that separates materials in liquids. It’s been used for cell confinement, biopatterning and tissue engineering. But despite their clear potential for concentrating biomarkers (biological signs linked to disease or health conditions), no ATPS had ever been designed specifically for blood assays (lab tests). That gap became my project. Over time, the idea has grown beyond simply working with smaller samples. The technology could also be used to screen many samples for a single biomarker in serosurveillance.
You had only a few minutes to make a case for your research. What was the hardest part of deciding what to include and did preparing the pitch change the way you think about your own research?
As researchers, we spend so long studying one niche topic that we get used to backing every claim with a mountain of evidence and data. When we're excited about something, we tend to either dive deep into everything we know or freeze while figuring out how to explain it to a different audience. I also experienced this feeling whilst preparing this pitch. It took me a long time to decide how to explain what I do in a way that also showed why it matters and how it could change an industry.
The hardest part was choosing which data to include and finding a single sentence that could capture everything it shows. Preparing the pitch was also a breath of fresh air. It pulled me out of the details and let me see my research from new perspectives, thanks to everyone who listened to me practice again and again, such as friends with completely different backgrounds, colleagues who held me to the standards of a scientific presentation, and my dogs, who pretended to pay attention in hopes of a treat.
Winning means you’ll now represent Atlantic Canada at the global finals in Berlin. Has the competition changed the way you think about the potential reach of your work and how are you preparing to present your research on an international stage?
Winning has given me the chance to represent one of the works from the Frampton Lab, and it reassured me that there are people who care about how big this could become. I'm working closely with our lab team and the team at Research Nova Scotia to prepare for my pitch at the international stage, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
I didn't expect our technology to fit so well with standard serum assays. With further refinement and recalculation, there's even potential to scale it up to detect multiple biomarkers at once.
When you think about where this research could eventually go, what are you most excited about? Is there a particular application or group of patients you hope it could benefit?
I'd love to see it become a standard add-on to ELISA (a common laboratory test used to detect antibodies and other biomarkers) in research and clinical labs around the world. Starting as a ready-to-use kit, it could also be used to screen many samples for a single biomarker in serosurveillance — monitoring a population for signs of infection through blood samples. Ultimately, I want it to make sensitive testing possible wherever samples are scarce, or resources are limited, from neonatal care to early disease detection to research subjects with limited blood volume.