Collaborative Research: A Microfluidic-CMOS Cross-cut Approach enabling Tri-Modal Biorecognition for Highly Accurate Viral Diagnostics

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This project seeks to develop a finger-stick sized instrument whose purpose is to rapidly diagnose viral infections in blood. The proposed point-of-use device can be utilized for rapidly screening subjects at airports, emergency rooms, or other crowded environments where the potential to spread viral disease is high. Point-of-use diagnosis of viral pathogens plays a critical role in response efforts to outbreaks, but is notoriously unreliable with a single mode of bio-molecular diagnostics due to patient-patient heterogeneity and variation of the biomarkers in the body fluid with time of infection. In this work, a microfluidics-CMOS-bio-chemistry crosscut approach is proposed to enable portable, compact point-of-use hybrid device technology that enables multi-modal detection capability including antibody detection, viral protein detection as well as viral load quantification in a single sample-to-answer platform. The proposed tri-modal diagnostic platform will enable diagnosis with minimal false-negatives, critically important for diagnosis. The crosscut approach towards this project will engage and train both graduate and undergraduate students across multiple disciplines. The PIs will also engage high-school seniors from local schools and broadly disseminate the knowledge through their proposed courses (undergraduate and graduate) and through publications, seminars and workshops. The proposed innovation is based on miniaturization of sample, reagent, and buffer handling in microfluidics using low power electronically actuated micro-valves, reconfigurable electroosmotic pumps, and multiplexed detection of fluorescence-labeled proteins and nucleic acids in silicon ICS with integrated nanoplasmonic filters that remove the necessity of complex optical scanners, lenses, collimators. The platform is envisioned to be generic and reconfigurable and the pre-functionalized cartridges can be swapped out for different infectious diseases. Specifically, the proposed research aims to investigate and develop multi-modal detection capability through electronically actuated fluidic valves and pumps enabling on-chip immunoassays for protein detection and on-chip nucleic acid purification, amplification, and hybridization for viral load determination as well as light guiding, packaging and additive manufacturing techniques for enabling a sample-to-answer platform.