Rapid Plasmonic PCR Device and Platform for Single Step Disease Detection and Treatment To Enable Infectious Disease Symptom To Treatment In Minutes

每年有超过14亿人被诊断出患有传染病。8天是一个人从第一个症状到治疗的平均延迟，这是由于增加的全科医生等待时间，昂贵的黄金标准测试和不可靠的护理点测试，这些测试敏感度和特异度低，无法准确指导治疗，例如针对多药耐药细菌开出正确的抗菌药处方。这种延误会导致严重的疾病，每年导致1500万以上可避免的死亡。我们正在研究一种传染病检测技术，可以将患者出现症状到治疗周期的时间缩短到30分钟以下。为此，我们首先开发了基于全光学快速聚合酶链式反应(PCR)的基础科学，从未经处理的样本中进行微生物检测，并最近进行了3D打印和测试，以在不到5分钟的时间内对未经处理的人类样本进行第一批基于激光的定量等离子PCRS之一。我们的原型使用小但强大的光学元件和纳米颗粒，以实时(Q-PCR)放大和检测病原体DNA，提供了5分钟的样品到结果的时间。更重要的是，它能够整合或消除从未经处理的样本中检测病原体的关键步骤(如细胞裂解、提取和纯化)，使其能够在不需要医疗保健专业人员或技术人员的情况下使用。我们能够创造出一种超轻和便携的设备，它比笔记本电脑更轻，可以在任何地方使用和运输。通过使用我们快速、一步、便携式和高精度的聚合酶链式反应，首先在护理点设置，然后在需要点或面向患者的设置中，我们可以使患者的诊断和治疗速度比现有管道快200倍(从8天到不到30分钟)，并使数亿患者免于长期健康并发症，并防止数百万人死亡。

1.4+ billion people are diagnosed with infectious diseases every year. 8 days is the average delay for a person to go from the first symptom to treatment, due to increasing GP wait times, costly gold standard testing with long turnaround times and unreliable point of care tests which suffer from low sensitivity and specificity and cannot accurately guide treatment, such as prescription of the right anti-biotic for a multi-drug resistant bugs. This delay leads to severe disease, causing 15 million+ avoidable deaths every year.We are working on an infectious disease detection technology that can reduce the time patients symptom to treatment cycle to under 30 minutes. For this, we first developed the underlying science for all optical rapid polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based microbial detection from unprocessed sample and have recently 3D printed and tested a base prototype to perform one of the first laser based quantitative plasmonic PCRs on an unprocessed human samples in under 5 minutes.Our prototype uses small but powerful optics and nanoparticles, to amplify and detect pathogen DNA in real time (q-PCR), to provide a <5 minute sample-to-result time. More importantly, it is able to integrate or remove the need for crucial steps (such as cell lysis, extraction and purification) to detect pathogens from unprocessed samples, enabling it to be used without the need for a healthcare professional or a technician. We are able to create an ultralightweight and portable device that is lighter than a laptop and can be used and transported anywhere. By using our fast, single step, portable and high accuracy PCR, first in point of care settings and subsequently in point-of-need or patient-facing settings, we can enable diagnosis and treatment for patients up to 200x faster (from 8 days to under 30 mins) than the existing pipelines and save hundreds of millions of patients from long term health complications and preventing millions of deaths.