Frontiers of Microfluidics - Week 2 of 4

CIMIT Summer Education Series 2008 Week Two: 
Frontiers of Microfluidics and Microsystems in Biomedical Sciences and Clinical Medicine

Series Moderators:
Mehmet Toner, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital; Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Shriners Hospital for Children, mtoner@partners.org

Daniel Irimia, PhD, Instructor, Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Researcher, Shriners Burns Hospital for Children, dirimia@partners.org

Integrated Silicon Micro-fluidic Devices for Detection of Bacteria
Rashid Bashir, PhD, Abel Bliss Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Bioengineering and Director, Micro and Nano Technology Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, rbashir@ad.uiuc.edu

Rapid detection of live bacteria poses a very important challenge with wide applications in food safety, pharmaceutical manufacturing, clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and global health. We will present an overview of our work in the development of silicon based biochips that aim to integrated various functions such as bacterial culture, electrical detection of bacterial growth, antibody and dielectrophoresis mediated capture of the bacterial cells, and biomolecular identification of the bacteria using PCR on chip, on the same chip. Status, challenges, and future directions will be described.

Microfluidic CD4 Cell Counting for Resource-Limited Settings
William Rodriguez, MD, Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital Infectious Disease Unit; Global Health Diagnostics, Harvard’s Partners AIDS Research Center, MGH, wrodriguez@partners.org

The HIV pandemic has created an unprecedented global health emergency. In response, the price of effective, life-saving HIV drug treatment has been reduced by 99%. More than $10 billion is now invested each year to treat people suffering from HIV and AIDS, and 3 million people have started treatment in the past five years.

Treatment is only half the battle, however. Of the 33 million people living with HIV worldwide, fewer than 10% have access to CD4 counts, the critical blood test used by clinicians to decide when to start treatment. Fewer than 1% have access to viral load assays, which are used for infant diagnosis and for patient monitoring. Both tests are considered essential to effective treatment. The Use Case for appropriate CD4 and viral load tests appropriate for resource-limited settings is clear: tests need to be performed by a minimally skilled health worker, at the true point of care, reliably and inexpensively, and with reasonable accuracy and precision. The HIV pandemic thus represents an unprecedented opportunity to drive technology development in point-of-care diagnostics.

Based on this Use Case, William Rodriguez's lab has developed a series of technologies for an integrated CD4 cell count device, with microfluidics as the key platform. First, it developed a microfluidic device for CD4 cell capture, based on cell immunoaffinity chromatography. Next, it developed an inexpensive, non-optical sensor based on cell lysate impedance spectroscopy. Integrative these microfluidic technologies has led to a prototype handheld device that can accurately capture CD4 cells from a 10 microliter fingerstick sample of whole blood, and accurately measure CD4 counts in under eight minutes.

Comments

[Mike Young]

I have emailed the participants and copied the email address you have supplied. If the email address you entered is not correct and would like me to use another, just email me again with the correct one. You should have the email now, they will answer this question for you as soon as they have time. Should be very soon.

Thanks for reading!

[THD]

How does one find out how much the rapid CD4 counter costs and where to source it?