Development of ultrafast colorimetric assays and devices for integration into the Nix Color Sensor

医疗点测试(POCT)是一种简单的医疗测试，可以将目前在中央设施进行的复杂疾病诊断和筛查测试带到患者床边，从而显著提高医疗保健质量。然而，只有少数POCT系统已经商业化，用于诊断、预测和筛查破坏性疾病，如细菌和病毒感染。这项拟议的研究将致力于设计、制造和测试一种基于智能手机的POCT诊断系统，该系统通过使用颜色识别特定物种的遗传序列来从患者样本中检测细菌和病毒病原体。利用DNA介导的超快颜色生成和使用Nix颜色传感器进行准确颜色识别的优势，该系统只需使用智能手机就可以在不到一小时的时间内分析主要传染病的临床样本，从而允许医生在一次就诊中以非侵入性的方式准确筛查患者。如果成功，基于智能手机的简单而廉价的测试，目前还不能使用，可以很容易地纳入常规体检，在患者出现明显症状之前进行筛查。这种早期筛查将极有希望实现个性化医疗保健，提高生活质量，并降低与患者护理相关的财务成本。

Point-of-care tests (POCT) are simple medical tests that can bring complex disease diagnostic and screening tests currently performed at centralized facilities to patients bedside and thus are envisioned to significantly improve the quality of healthcare. However, only a few POCT systems have been commercialized for diagnosis, prognosis, and screening of devastating diseases, such as bacteria and virus infections. This proposed research will work towards design, fabrication and testing of a smartphonebased POCT diagnostic system that detects bacterial and viral pathogens from patient samples by identifying species-specific genetic sequences using color. Leveraging the advantages of DNA-mediated ultrafast color generation and accurate color identification using the Nix Color Sensor, this system will analyze clinical sample for major infectious diseases in less than one hour by just using a smartphone and thus allow physicians to screen patients accurately in a non-invasive manner during a single visit. If successful, the simple and inexpensive smartphone-based tests, which are currently not available, can be easily incorporated into a routine physical checkup to screen patients before presentation of overt symptoms. Such early screening will hold great promise to enable personalized healthcare, improve quality of life, and decrease the financial costs associated with patient care.