EAGER: Magnetoelectric Biosensor for Rapid Point-of-Care COVID-19 diagnostics

有效大流行管理的一个关键组成部分是有效的感染监测和接触者追踪。由冠状病毒SARS-CoV-2引起的COVID-19检测主要局限于寻求医疗护理的有症状患者。然而，这种方法忽略了症状轻微或无症状的个体感染，这些个体实际上具有高度传染性。虽然为应对COVID-19大流行，使用最先进仪器的诊断检测的可获得性已迅速扩大，但在有效的疾病监测和接触者追踪方面仍然严重不足。仍然迫切需要在护理点进行超灵敏、简单和快速的诊断分析，以便进行大规模的人群检测和筛查。目前缺乏快速扩展和可部署的诊断工具，无法对COVID-19进行有效的大规模监测，这是COVID-19大流行管理的一个重大障碍。由于传染病不断出现，这种超灵敏的诊断工具可能会持续到可预见的未来。这些工具的成功可以对癌症生物标志物和其他传染病的诊断和定量以及对环境危害和污染物的监测产生重大影响。该项目将与休斯顿大学现有的项目紧密结合，以加强对女性和未被充分代表的少数民族进入科学和工程领域的招聘。这项研究将使一些本科生的顶点设计项目。通过本项目获得的知识将通过Cullen工程学院的pi提供的纳米工程辅修课程和研究生课程进行传播。该EAGER项目旨在证明一种廉价、紧凑、超灵敏的磁电生物传感器平台的可行性，该平台旨在定量检测患者样本中的SARS-CoV-2病毒核蛋白。提出的生物传感器是基于磁报告纳米颗粒检测的横向流动试验（类似于妊娠试验中使用的技术）的测试线使用磁电谐振传感器。磁电传感器利用应变介导的能量在磁致伸缩和压电传感器元件之间传递。这些传感器能够将磁性纳米颗粒产生的极弱的外部磁场有效地转换为电信号。这项技术预计将比目前最先进的抗原检测诊断灵敏得多。可实现的灵敏度也可能超过目前仅在集中实验室中可用的最先进工具的灵敏度。新的生物传感器将利用廉价和高度可扩展的制造方法，通常用于制造微机电系统。该生物传感器将由一次性磁电横向流动测定盒和一个简单的电子读出器组成，该电子读出器使用低成本的现成电子元件构建。该技术是灵敏检测和定量鼻咽拭子或唾液样本中SARS-CoV-2病毒核蛋白的理想技术。它有可能成为大流行管理的宝贵工具。该技术的成功演示将建立一个广泛应用于生物医学科学和临床诊断的分析和诊断平台。该平台技术将很容易扩展到其他类型的传染病、癌症生物标志物检测和食品/环境污染物监测。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A key component of effective pandemic management is efficient infection surveillance and contact tracing. Testing for COVID-19, caused by the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been primarily limited to symptomatic patients who seek medical care. However, this approach misses infections in individuals with mild or no symptoms, who are, in fact, highly contagious. While the availability of diagnostic tests using state-of-the-art instrumentation has been rapidly scaled up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains woefully inadequate for effective disease surveillance and contact tracing. There remains an urgent critical need for ultrasensitive, simple, and rapid diagnostic assays at the point-of-care to enable wide-scale population testing and screening. The ongoing lack of quickly scalable and deployable diagnostic tools for effective wide-scale COVID-19 surveillance is a significant handicap in COVID-19 pandemic management. Such ultrasensitive diagnostic tools are likely to persist into the foreseeable future due to continuously emerging infectious diseases. The success of these tools can make a significant impact at the point-of-care for diagnostic and quantitation of cancer biomarkers and other infectious diseases as well as for the surveillance of environmental hazards and contaminants. This project will be closely integrated with the existing programs at the University of Houston to enhance the recruitment of women and underrepresented minorities into the fields of science and engineering. This research will enable a number of undergraduate Capstone Design projects. The knowledge gained over the course of this project will be disseminated through the Nano Engineering Minor option and graduate courses offered by the PIs in the Cullen College of Engineering.This EAGER aims to demonstrate the feasibility of an inexpensive, compact, and ultrasensitive magneto electric biosensor platform designed for quantitative detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus nucleoprotein in patient samples. The proposed biosensor is based on magnetic reporter nanoparticles detection in a test line of a lateral flow assay (similar to the technology used in a pregnancy test) using magnetoelectric resonant sensors. Magnetoelectric sensors utilize strain-mediated energy transfer between magnetostrictive and piezoelectric sensor components. These sensors enable the efficient conversion of exceedingly weak external magnetic fields produced by magnetic nanoparticles into electrical signals. The technology is expected to be far more sensitive than current state-of-the-art antigen-detection diagnostics. The achievable sensitivity is also likely to be exceeding the sensitivity of the state-of-the-art tools currently available only at centralized laboratories. The new biosensors will leverage inexpensive and highly scalable manufacturing approaches routinely employed to fabricate micro-electromechanical systems. The biosensor will be comprised of disposable magnetoelectric lateral flow assay cartridges and a simple electronic readout built using low-cost off-the-shelf electronic components. The technology is ideal for sensitively detecting and quantifying the SARS-CoV-2 virus nucleoprotein in nasopharyngeal swabs or saliva samples. It has the potential to become an invaluable tool in pandemic management. Successful demonstration of the technology will establish an analytical and diagnostic platform widely useful in biomedical science and clinical diagnostics. This platform technology will be readily extendable to other types of infectious diseases, detection of cancer biomarkers, and food/environmental contaminants monitoring.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.