EAGER: Integrating Optical Fiber Bridges in Microfluidic Devices for Ultrasensitive Analysis of Biomarkers in Single Cells

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There are no Point of Care sensing platforms that are available to monitor a patient's biological response to disease triggers such as airborne irritants and toxins by direct and rapid profiling of critical biomarkers. There are also no platforms for monitoring the recurrence of an infectious disease or cancer that may be present in biofluid samples. Such biomarker-based diagnostics could have numerous applications in precision medicine. These devices could lead to personalized treatment strategies for individual patients. This project will develop such a system that will also be useful for the diagnosis of cancers in early stages by identifying rare aberrant cells in biological samples taken during annual physical examinations.The PIs will develop a microfluidic device for single cell analysis that incorporates an out-of-plane multimode optical fiber to generate three excitation and three detection points using only one source and one detector. Light will be propagated through the fiber in a tunneling mode so that two excitation and detection spots can be generated at the end of the fiber. The efficiency of loading and substrate specificity will be evaluated, and peptide sequences modified to optimize loading efficiency.