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

护理点检测（POCT）是一种简单的医学检测，可将目前在集中设施进行的复杂疾病诊断和筛查检测带到患者床边，因此有望显著提高医疗保健质量。然而，只有少数POCT系统被商业化用于诊断、预后和筛查破坏性疾病，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物种特异性基因序列来检测患者样本中的细菌和病毒病原体。该系统利用dna介导的超快颜色生成和使用Nix颜色传感器的准确颜色识别的优势，只需使用智能手机，就可以在不到一个小时的时间内分析主要传染病的临床样本，从而使医生能够在单次就诊期间以无创方式准确筛查患者。如果成功，这种基于智能手机的简单而廉价的测试（目前还没有）可以很容易地纳入常规身体检查，在出现明显症状之前对患者进行筛查。这种早期筛查将为实现个性化医疗保健、提高生活质量和降低与患者护理相关的财务成本带来巨大希望。

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.