Paul Yager,
Professor, Department of Bioengineering,
University of Washington and CSO, UbiDX, Inc.
Paul Yager, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington and the CSO, UbiDX, Inc. A native of Manhattan, he received his A.B. in Biochemistry from Princeton in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oregon in 1980, specializing in vibrational spectroscopy of biomolecules. After an NRC Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory (1980-1982), he joined the NRL staff as a Research Chemist. He moved to the Center (now Department) of Bioengineering at the University of Washington as Associate Professor in 1987, advancing to Professor in 1995; he served as Chair of the department from 2007 to 2013. Initially working on both self-organizing lipid microstructure and optically-based biomedical sensors, since 1992 his lab has focused primarily on development of microfluidics for the analysis of biological fluids for use in low-cost point-of-care biomedical diagnostics for the developed and developing worlds. From 2005-2010 a team led by Yager was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a low-cost rugged point-of-care system for pathogen identification. Since 2008, most lab activity (with several close partners) has focused on developing two-dimensional porous networks for ultra-low-cost instrument-free point-of-care pathogen identification for human diagnosis. Readout is often coupled with cell phones for quantitative analysis and data transmission; this has been under support of NIH, NSF, DARPA and DTRA. He has authored 156 research publications in refereed journals, and has 40 issued patents. Specifics are at http://faculty.washington.edu/yagerp/.
Re-envisioning Point-of-Care Pathogen Diagnostics for the Developed and Developing Worlds
Whether the purpose is to guide treatment of an individual’s infection, or to control the outbreak of a pandemic, there is an urgent need for low-cost rapid diagnostic devices capable of identifying the cause of infectious disease that free testing from the centralized laboratory. “Ubiquitous diagnostics”, aided by the revolution that brought us today’s distributed computing and communications, can bring the best diagnostic capabilities to physicians’ office laboratories and pharmacies in the developed world, or to places in the developing world where nothing is available now. The practice of medicine itself can be improved if diagnostic tests could be carried out more rapidly and pervasively. The Yager lab has been engaged in a 20-year pursuit of microfluidics-based tools and complete systems for pathogen identification in human samples, most recently in an inexpensive instrument-free single-use disposable format that could be used by consumers in their homes and by healthcare workers in low-resource settings in the developing world. The central effort today is to utilize capillary action in porous materials to eliminate the need for pumps and other equipment to control fluid flow. By coupling the chemical testing with cell phones, critical health data can be analyzed rapidly and anywhere, and the best healthcare decisions can be made for patients, for regional healthcare systems, and for global health. There have been 3 analytical approaches pursued in our group: Identification and quantification of 1) antibodies specific to pathogens, 2) proteins of the pathogens, and 3) nucleic acid sequences derived from the pathogens. We report on recent results on particularly simple paper-based systems supported by NIH (detection of influenza proteins; improvement of specificity of Zika virus serology), DARPA (detection of DNA and RNA from bacterial and viral pathogens) and DTRA (detection of proteins from the Ebola virus). All projects involve close collaboration with partners inside and outside the university environment, and are aimed at producing clinically useful tools for point-of-care medicine.
Add to Calendar ▼2017-10-02 00:00:002017-10-04 00:00:00Europe/LondonLab-on-a-Chip and Microfluidics World Congress 2017Lab-on-a-Chip and Microfluidics World Congress 2017 in Coronado Island, CaliforniaCoronado Island, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Add to Calendar ▼SELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
