Smart Phone can be used to as lab technician

A team of researchers, led by Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from a finger  prick of blood in just 15 minutes.  Specifically, it performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent  assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone. It performs a triplexed immunoassay not currently available in a single test  format: HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection.

Reerence: T. Laksanasopin, T. W. Guo, S. Nayak, A. A. Sridhara, S. Xie, O. O. Olowookere, P. Cadinu, F. Meng, N. H. Chee, J. Kim, C. D. Chin, E. Munyazesa, P. Mugwaneza, A. J. Rai, V. Mugisha, A. R. Castro, D. Steinmiller, V. Linder, J. E. Justman, S. Nsanzimana, S. K. Sia. A smartphone dongle for diagnosis of infectious diseases at the point of care. Science Translational Medicine, 2015; 7 (273): 273re1 DOI:  Link to research article

Science Cartoon by Vishal K. Muliya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://vkmuliya.blogspot.com.

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