I-Corps: Mini-Disc Point-of-Care Personalized Diagnostic Platform

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is a portable single cell electrokinetic separation platform for healtchare applications. It can be implemented in hospitals, medical offices, and laboratories to improve patient outcomes by allowing for a wide array of sample-to-answer biological tests. This is considered a personalized diagnostic and can be performed in doctors’ offices and at the patient bedside, including early diagnostic of circulating tumor cells or testing for sepsis or heart attack, and also for improving biopharmaceutical drug discovery and biosynthesis. This I-Corps project is based on the development of the electrokinetic micro- and nano-assembly process. The goal of the outlined technology development and commercialization project is to create a universal portable centrifugal microfluidic platform that will be applicable for a wide range of tests from general fluid chemistry assays to biomarker assays and single cell analysis. This platform could find widespread use in hospitals and medical offices as well as in scientific laboratories. The proposed compact microfluidic system unifies sample preprocessing capabilities possible on a centrifugal microfluidic platform with electrokinetic sorting, separation, and capture of biological cells and molecules. The proposing team has expertise, capability, and needed resources to undertake the technical development and commercialization of the proposed centrifugal microfluidic sample-to-answer platform. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.