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

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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.