Abstract

The Cellphone Future of Precision Medicine: Enhanced TIRF Microarrays for Accurate and Rapid iDiagnostics

Alexander Asanov, Chief Scientific Officer, TIRF Labs Inc

There are over 7 billion cellphone users in the world. Most of the cellphones are equipped with numerous sensors, powerful computers, and high resolution CCD cameras. Cellphones have changed the landscape of many technological areas. Their capabilities can be employed for home-use precision diagnostics, as well as point-of-care applications. Cellphone-based diagnostics offers numerous opportunities for improving the health care. In this talk, I will present a novel cellphone-based platform technology, termed iDiagnostics, which is capable of detecting protein, nucleic acid, and metabolite biomarkers simultaneously, in real-time mode, using a droplet of blood, saliva, urine, or other biofluids. The technology is based on Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) and is rapid, supersensitive, and multiplexed, which allows for precision diagnosing and accurate prognosing. Yet, iDiagnostics is inexpensive. The cradle will cost $200-$300, and disposable cartridges $1-5, if manufactured massively.  iDiagnostics microarray employs a silk fibroin self-assembled nanometer-scale structure, which implements several functions. Firstly, silk fibroin film captures the excitation light from the TIRF lightguide and allows for much greater immobilization of affinity reagents at the surface of TIRF sensor chip. Since the resulting signal is a thousand-fold greater than that with classical TIRF, sensitivity of cellphone CCD cameras is sufficient for detection. Secondly, silk fibroin scaffold provides biologically-friendly environment for bioassay immobilization, preserving their activity after immobilization. Thirdly, silk-encapsulation prolongs shelf life of antibodies and other biological compounds, a feature which is important for diagnostics in low resources settings. High sensitivity and broad dynamic range of iDiagnostics allows for detecting the entire range of clinically significant biomarkers. Multiplexed format of iDiagnostics permits precision quantification of the