I-Corps: Integrated System for Rapid Pathogen Enrichment and Detection

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project addresses the need for rapid, accurate, and high-throughput diagnostic testing platforms. Given the urgency of this need, the team's first product aims to support ongoing SARS-CoV-2 disease diagnosis by enabling point-of-care diagnosis from a patient nasal swab within minutes. Despite the prevalence and rapid spread of the disease, the majority of diagnostic tests remain time intensive, require numerous external reagents, and/or lack detection sensitivity in the early stages of infection. The team hypothesizes that the technology has significant value in this space and is interested in exploring this potential value more thoroughly through I-Corps. The technology may also find application to other diagnostic markets that traditionally rely on culture-based detection and/or nucleic acid amplification technologies. The platform can process complex biofluids and large volume samples, which could translate to pathogen detection in a range of biological fluids, including urine, saliva, and synovial fluid for the detection of urinary tract infections, respiratory infections, and joint infections, respectively. There are also a number of potential non-medical applications, including food and water quality monitoring, biosecurity surveillance, and applications to the point-of-care.

This I-Corps project focuses on understanding the market need for the platform, which performs nanoscale Pathogen Enrichment and Detection (nano-PED). For infectious disease, current diagnostic methodologies remain extremely time-consuming, costly, and rely on labor intensive sample preparation steps, followed by additional steps for pathogen identification and characterization. The platform aims to: 1) circumvent laborious sample preparation steps through direct isolation of rare pathogens from a patient's biofluid sample, and 2) eliminate the need for molecular amplification through ultrasensitive, sequence-specific nucleic acid detection. More specifically, nano-PED capitalizes on the diverse scientific applications of nanoparticles to integrate pathogen capture and species-specific detection onto a single chip. The technology is a micro-scale platform that isolates bacteria, fungi, and/or virus from a patient sample and identifies the disease-causing pathogen through ultrasensitive nucleic acid characterization.

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.