Abstract

Point of care Cellular and Molecular Diagnostics at Resource Limited Setting

Aman Russom, Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

There is a growing demand for simple, affordable, reliable and quality-assured point of care (POC)diagnostics for use in resource-limited settings.Among the top 10 leading causes of death worldwide, three are infectious diseases, namely respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS and diarrheal diseases. Although high-quality diagnostic tests are available, these are often not available to patients in developing countries. While recent development in microfluidics and “lab-on-a-chip” devices have the potential to spur the development of protocols and affordable instruments for diagnosis of infectious disease at POC, integration of complex sample preparation and detection into automated molecular and cellular systems remain a bottleneck for implementation of these systems at resource-limited settings. Towards this, we describe here how low-cost optical drives can, with minor modifications, be turned into POC diagnostic platforms. A DVD drive is essentially a highly advanced and low cost optical laser-scanning microscope, with the capability to deliver high-resolution images for biological applications. Furthermore, the inherent centrifugal force on rotational discs is elegantly used for sample preparation and integration. Hence, the merging of low-cost optical disk drives with centrifugal microfluidics is feasible concept for POC diagnostics, specifically designed to meet the needs at resource-limited settings.