Brian Cunningham,
Professor and Intel Alumni Endowed Chair,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Prof. Cunningham has been a faculty member in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the department Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2004, following a 15-year career in Industry. Prof. Cunningham’s technical focus is the utilization of photonics for biosensing in applications that include life science research, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and pharmaceutical screening. He has over 90 issued US patents and over 200 peer reviewed journal publications. He is a Fellow of NAI, IEEE, Optica, RSC, AAAS, and AIMBE. He serves as the Director of the Center for Genomic Diagnostics at the Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and as a Program Leader for the Cancer Center at Illinois on the topic of Cancer Measurement Technology and Data Science. In 2023, his technical contributions were recognized by Optica by the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award.
Digital Resolution Detection Without Droplets or Enzymes through Photonic Crystal Amplification
Thursday, 30 November 2023 at 14:30
Add to Calendar ▼2023-11-30 14:30:002023-11-30 15:30:00Europe/LondonDigital Resolution Detection Without Droplets or Enzymes through Photonic Crystal AmplificationMaterials and Tools for Developing POC and Rapid Dx 2023 in Laguna Hills, CaliforniaLaguna Hills, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Droplet digital biomarker detection technologies achieve ultrasensitive detection limits by partitioning the test sample into thousands of small volumes that confine the fluorescent products of an enzymatic amplification reaction, followed by counting bright droplets. Using photonic crystal surfaces to amplify the fluorescence of light-emitting tags such as quantum dots and plasmonic fluors, individual nucleic acid biomarkers, proteins, and virus particles can be digitally counted without sample partitioning or enzymatic reactions, resulting in simple workflow, rapid sample-to-answer time, and ultrasensitivity using simple inexpensive instruments. We have also developed digital alternatives to PCR that offer room temperature, isothermal biochemistry methods based upon nucleic acid strand displacement reactions and CRISPR/Cas technology which rapidly amplify single target nucleic acid biomarkers (miRNA and ctDNA) into large numbers of gold nanoparticles that are digitally counted by Photonic Resonator Absorption Microscopy (PRAM). We show that an “amplify-then-digitize” strategy results in detection limits below PCR while utilizing a simple protocol and inexpensive instrument. Overall, we envision application of the biodetection technologies and assay methods towards ultrasensitive and multiplexed point of care diagnostics.
