Last Friday I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Paul Yager. He came to UCI to talk about his work in point-of-care diagnostics for the developing world but before he stopped by our lab to see what was cooking. It turned out I was in the middle of an experiment… luckily it was working!
During his seminar Dr. Yager started with his Gate’s Foundation funded project. They call it the DxBox (yes it’s a reference to Microsoft’s xBox) and it gathers the efforts of PATH, Micronics, Epoch BioSciences and the University of Washington. They already have a couple of prototypes and it is meant to be a RNA-DNA diagnostic platform based on microfluidic cards. It will be able to diagnose Dengue, Measles, Influenza, Malaria, Typhoid and Rickettsia.
The microfluidic cards are laminates of laser cut Mylar and PMMA and the DxBox contains the pumps and imaging capabilities to control flow and analyze data. In order to increase shelf life they have dehydrated the antibodies or antigens required for each assay and stored them in the cards. They published a paper in 2008 about this in LOC.
The most interesting stuff however was when he talked about their work in paper microfluidics. Paper microfluidics it’s not new and others, like Dr. George Whitesides and his group at Harvard, have been working on the concept. The things that Dr. Yager showed however were pretty impressive. They can control flow pretty well considering it’s all capillary driven and you just need paper. H-filters, flow meters, sequential delivery, delayed flow lines… it’s all pretty much a done deal in Dr. Yager’s lab. I am definitely keeping an interested eye on their future papers regarding this!
