I-Corps: Barcode Blotting Diagnostic Technology for Point-of-Care Testing

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The proliferation of chronic infectious diseases in the developed and developing world demonstrates the vital need to make presently slow and labor intensive laboratory diagnostics cheaper and more portable with the requisite sensitivity and specificity to be deployed as field diagnostic assays. The integrated barcode diagnostic tool developed at UC Berkeley significantly reduces assay cost and time while providing health practitioners with critical new information on disease state for accurate on-the spot screening and treatment of infectious diseases including HIV/HCV (hepatitis C) co-infection. The proposed work will enable prototyping, needs assessment and collection of customer and industry feedback towards development of the first multiplexed electrophoretic platform for immunoassay of biomarkers from whole blood. The team's core technology is a three-dimensional hydrogel matrix which enables specific antibody (IgG) capture and detection. There exists an opportunity to introduce an integrated diagnostic platform technology preserving the low cost, small footprint, ease-of-use and portability of current screening diagnostics while adding the high-specificity (accuracy) provided by slow, manual-labor intensive confirmatory diagnostics that are presently run in large centralized laboratories. The key advances in biologically-functionalized polyacrylamide photo-patterning technology provide a multiplexed barcode blotting immunoassay with simple and fast operation. Transforming sophisticated and high performance assays into a single low-cost portable tool can significantly advance diagnosis of HIV and hepatitis C (HCV). Commercializing the barcode blotting technology for rapid (30 min) and multiplexed HIV/HCV screening diagnostics would make a major contribution to improving world healthcare while also providing entry into a commercial market primed for significant growth over the next several years.