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

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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.