IDBR TYPE A: Optofluidic laser array based ultrasensitive ELISA instrument with a large dynamic range

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This NSF IDBR award is made to Prof. Xudong Fan at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor to develop a new bioassay platform. Significantly improved ELISA performance will certainly benefit nearly all biological/biomedical disciplines as well as industries by detecting or characterizing analytes that would otherwise be undetectable at much lower costs. In addition, the students in the project will receive rigorous technical and entrepreneurial training through lab research and partnership with the Master of Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Michigan. Furthermore, internship at bioassay companies will provide an excellent opportunity for them to receive first-hand experience in an industrial setting. Dissemination of knowledge and instrument will include journal publications, conference presentations, patent filing, public seminars, and demonstration of the prototype at technology tradeshows. In particular, the prototype will be placed in two labs at the Univ. Michigan Medical School and a bioassay company at Ann Arbor for independent verification. Eventually, the dissemination of the instrument will be through commercialization via a start-up company or in partnership with industrial companies.The goal of this project is to develop an optofluidic laser array based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) instrument that can significantly improve the performance of the current fluorescence based ELISA in detection limit, dynamic range, and sample consumption. Traditional ELISA has been widely used in biological sciences and biomedicine for over half a century. It uses fluorescence as the sensing signal and suffers from low sensitivity, low dynamic range, and relatively large sample consumption. The new ELISA platform in this NSF project performs ELISA inside an optofluidic laser cavity. Instead of fluorescence, the laser emission is used as the sensing signal. In particular, the laser onset time when the laser emission starts to occur is used to quantify the analytes inside the laser cavity. It is expected that 100 to 1000-fold improvement in both detection limit and dynamic range will be achieved in comparison with the traditional ELISA. Meanwhile, the sample consumption will be reduced over 1000-fold.