Portable microfluidic integrated plasmonic platform for pathogen detection

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Microfluidics
• Biosensing

Background:

• Timely detection of infectious agents is crucial for effective disease diagnosis and treatment.
• Conventional methods (ELISA, culturing, PCR) are time-consuming, expensive, and unsuitable for point-of-care (POC) applications.
• A need exists for rapid, simple, and accurate pathogen detection methods for POC settings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a portable, multiplex, and inexpensive microfluidic-integrated surface plasmon resonance (SPR) platform.
• To enable rapid detection and quantification of bacterial pathogens at the POC.

Main Methods:

• Development of a microfluidic-integrated SPR platform.
• Testing the platform's ability to capture and detect Escherichia coli (E. coli) in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) and peritoneal dialysis (PD) fluid.
• Evaluating the platform's multiplexing and specificity for Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus).

Main Results:

• The platform demonstrated reliable capture and detection of E. coli across a concentration range of approximately 10^5 to 3.2 × 10^7 Colony Forming Units (CFUs)/mL.
• Successful testing of multiplexing and specificity capabilities with S. aureus samples.
• The platform achieved rapid detection of target bacteria.

Conclusions:

• The developed SPR platform is a promising technology for rapid, multiplexed bacterial detection at the POC.
• This technology can be adapted for detecting other pathogens in primary care and resource-constrained settings.
• It addresses the unmet need for accessible and efficient infectious disease diagnostics.