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SELECTBIO Conferences Lab-on-a-Chip and Microfluidics: Companies, Technologies and Commercialization

Paul Yager's Biography



Paul Yager, Professor, Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington

Paul Yager is the Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Yager served as the The Hunter and Dorothy Simpson Endowed Chair, Department of Bioengineering from 2008-2013. Professor Yager's research focuses on microfluidics and its applications in global health.

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Re-envisioning Point-of-Care Pathogen Diagnostics for the Developed and Developing Worlds

Monday, 2 October 2017 at 14:00

Add to Calendar ▼2017-10-02 14:00:002017-10-02 15:00:00Europe/LondonRe-envisioning Point-of-Care Pathogen Diagnostics for the Developed and Developing WorldsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

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: Companies, Technologies and CommercializationSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com