3D Printing

UCLA Researchers Design Low-Cost Smartphone Blood Tester

The smartphone is probably the most exciting computing tool human beings have at their disposal.  You can do amazing and important things, like take billions of selfies, play Candy Crush, stare at it instead of looking at people, take videos and photos of people and upload them online without their permission, be spied on…by…the…NSA…wait a minute.  What the hell are we doing we these things?

Like television before it, the smartphone has the potential to be a powerful educational tool.  But unlike most televisions, your smartphone is a computer.  It can be programmed.  As the price and size of powerful sensors continues to drop and computing takes on a limitless capacity in the cloud, the potential for new killer apps that serve an important purpose is higher than ever.  Enter researchers from California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.  They’ve created a smartphone-based diagnostic tool that reads blood samples for bacteria and viruses as well as the large machines found in clinical laboratories.

Mobile ELISA device

The researchers’ diagnostic tool is capable of reading an ELISA plate. The name stands for Enzyme-linked immunosorbant assay. It is designed to detect antigens in samples of blood, with an ELISA test used to detect a number of bacteria, as well as viruses, such as HIV, West Nile virus, and hepatitis B.  As you can imagine, it is used in many hospitals all over the world.  Among other applications, ELISA tests can be used to determine if there are allergens in food.  The research – spearheaded by Aydogan Ozcan, associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute, Dino Di Carlo, professor of bioengineering, and Omai Garner, associate director of clinical microbiology for the UCLA Health System and written by UCLA undergraduate Brandon Berg (the study’s first author) – manages to shrink this work down to the size and cost of this diagnostic test using modern smartphones.

elisa4-809x1024

ELISA testing is usually performed with little honeycomb shaped plates that have 96 tiny wells embedded in them.  Blood samples are tested after specific antibodies that bind to antigens meet the blood in the embedded well portion of the plate. The introduced antibodies contain enzymes whose substrates react chemically and cause a distinct change in color. Any antigens that may be present can be detected from analyzing the color changes.

So how does the handheld ELISA diagnostic tool work? The device connects to the smartphone via a 3D printed attachment and hits the ELISA plate with a variety of light-emitting diodes. After the light is projected through each well, 96 individual plastic optical fibers in the attachment collect a multitude of images. The smartphone sends the resulting images to UCLA’s servers through a custom app.  A machine-learning algorithm that the research team wrote analyzes the results.  Within one-minute, the diagnostic results are sent back to the phone in a user friendly visualization.

This isn’t the first smartphone-related test that Dr. Ozcan has developed.  Previously covered on 3DPI, Ozcan has also created a mobile device for detecting water contamination and a mobile microscope.  “It is quite important to have these kinds of mobile devices, especially for administering medical tests that are usually done in a hospital or clinical laboratory,” remarked Ozcan. “This mobile platform can be used for point-of-care testing, screening populations for particular diseases, or tracking vaccination campaigns in most resource-poor settings. It’s fantastic for an undergrad to be first author on the publication.”

elisa7-1024x998

The FDA-approved well-plate readers used in clinical labs today were compared with the team’s handheld smartphone diagnostic in a UCLA clinical microbiology laboratory.  Mumps, measles, and herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2 were all part of the dual ELISA tests. From 571 patient samples, the mobile platform was 99.6 percent accurate at diagnosing mumps, 98.6 percent for measles, and 99.4 percent for both herpes simplex 1 and 2.

“Our team is focused on developing biomedical technologies that work with mobile platforms to assist with on-site testing and health-care in disadvantaged or rural areas,” Berg said. “We are always looking toward the next innovation, and are looking to adapt the basic design of this ELISA cell-phone reader to create smartphone-based quantified readers for other important medical tests,” Di Carlo added.

Though I don’t think anyone would want to take a selfie with that particular smartphone, I’m glad researchers are creating something that could democratize diagnostic testing for bacteria and viruses that severely affect the lives of people around the world.