Disposable Porous Membranes to Enable Rapid and Inexpensive Nucleic Acid Amplification-Based Viral Diagnostic Toolkit at the Point of Need
Abstract
FY21 PRMRP Topic Area Addressed by the Proposed Research: Emerging Viral Diseases. Recent viral outbreaks (Novel Corona virus – 2019, Zika – 2016) has exposed some of the key limitations facing current infectious disease management strategies. Existing approaches of testing viral infections can take up to days, which is not ideal at times like a pandemic. The high testing time is primarily due to limited number of complex testing instruments available in specialized laboratories, clinics, and hospitals where most of the individual samples (like saliva or nasal swabs) are processed. What if you could perform a do it yourself (DIY) viral test at home by using an inexpensive device and just your smartphone? When we have DIY pregnancy tests, glucose tests, and other simple tests that can be done at home, then why don’t we have a home-based viral test? This is primarily because accurate detection of viral infections requires human samples to undergo complicated sample preparation steps followed by several heating steps. We address this issue by proposing an extremely simple smartphone operated device that can automatically prepare and heat your sample without an actual heater. Our solution uses a kind of waste heat generated by the device to heat the samples. If you have ever driven a car with electric breaks (aka induction breaks), you would have experienced this phenomenon where the car slows down or stops by dissipating its kinetic energy as heat. We are proposing to harness a very similar phenomenon at a smaller scale by converting the kinetic energy of a spinning compact disc-like object to heat energy, which can be channeled towards heating the sample itself. The resulting device aims to be extremely portable and user friendly that can be operated with any smartphone, enabling home-based viral testing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 28, 2022
- Source ID
- W81XWH2210071
Entities
People
- Aashish Priye
Organizations
- United States Army
- University of Cincinnati