$968,915
Self-Powered Smart Cards for Diagnostic Screening
University of Washington
Focus: To develop a rapid, low-cost, self-powered, easy-to-use device to detect infectious agents in blood.
Outcomes of this project could help transition diagnostic testing away from centralized labs to satellite labs, to the physician’s office and finally to at-home testing. The investigators intend to develop a family of rapid, low-cost, self-powered, easy-to-use devices that could reliably enable initial infectious disease diagnoses at a variety of point-of-care sites. These disposable devices will combine “smart” nanomaterial-based reagents with non-instrumented lab card formats. The research team’s objective is to develop a prototype that can detect different infectious agents from a finger-stick of whole blood using a disposable plastic lab card. A “smart” card device such as this could provide a more economical means to diagnostic services for disadvantaged populations in Washington state and across the nation.
Co-Applicant Organization: Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH)
Grant Update
“This project brings together the University of Washington and PATH to develop a very low-cost, non-instrumented (e.g., self-powered), easy-to-use diagnostic device that could reliably perform initial infectious disease diagnoses in low technology environments. Point-of-care (POC) devices that require no instrumentation or external reagents have an intrinsic advantage in settings that are somewhat removed from hospital and centralized labs. The device development has brought together "smart" nanomaterial-based reagents and detection systems from the Stayton group at UW with self-powering diagnostic systems from PATH. Over the first year a prototype POC diagnostic platform has been developed for HIV diagnostic testing and the molecular reagent systems needed for this test have been validated. Over the upcoming year a prototype device will be developed based on these successful results.”
