EFRI-BioFlex: Cellphone-based Digital Immunoassay Platform for High-throughput Sensitive and Multiplexed Detection and Distributed Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Influenza

世界各地迫切需要便携式、快速、灵敏和特定的流感监测系统。国际流感协会建议在一个灵活、经济实惠的现场便携式远程医疗平台内从根本上改善流感的诊断情况。他们将开发一种数字免疫分析系统，该系统利用新的电自适应和可编程微流控技术以及基于手机的多光谱荧光细胞术和计算显微镜工具。拟议的系统将创建包含液滴的数十万个编码粒子的阵列。这些粒子将首先使用惯性-微流控分选进行均匀分割，以便每滴只有一个粒子，其中流感亚型抗原和相关的酶联抗体夹心的存在将导致？开或关？每一滴中都有荧光信号。然后，发光的液滴数量(对应于具有不同亚型特异性抗体的特定颜色和形状编码的颗粒)将使用基于手机的多光谱成像细胞测量系统进行并行成像。通过在同一部手机上运行的定制开发的智能应用程序，这些免疫分析图像将立即被分析，以敏感和快速地检测各种流感亚型，测试结果也将被无线传输到安全服务器，从而实现对疾病的实时时空映射和分析。

There is an urgent need for portable, rapid, sensitive and specific influenza surveillance systems worldwide. The PI proposes to fundamentally improve the diagnostic landscape of influenza within a flexible, cost-effective, and field portable telemedicine platform. They will develop a digital immunoassay system that makes use of novel electro-adaptive and programmable microfluidics technologies as well as cellphone based multispectral fluorescent cytometry and computational microscopy tools. The proposed system will create arrays of hundreds of thousands of encoded particles containing fluid droplets. These particles will be first segmented equally using inertial-microfluidic sorting so that there is a single particle per drop, where the presence of influenza subtype antigens and the associated enzyme-linked antibody sandwich will lead to an ?on or off? fluorescence signal in each drop. The number of drops lighting up (corresponding to specific color- and shape-coded particles with different subtype-specific antibodies) will then be imaged all in parallel using a cellphone-based multispectral imaging cytometry system. Through a custom-developed smart application running on the same cellphone, these immunoassay images will immediately be analyzed for sensitive and rapid detection of various influenza subtypes, where the test results will also be transmitted wirelessly to secure servers, enabling real-time spatio-temporal mapping and analysis of the disease.