Gold Nanoparticle Smartphone Platform for Diagnosing Urinary Tract Infections

Current urinary tract infection (UTI) diagnostic methods are slow or provide limited information, resulting in prescribing antibiotic therapy before bacterial pathogen identification. Here, we adapted a gold nanoparticle colorimetric approach and developed a smartphone platform for UTI detection. We show the parallel identification of five major UTI pathogens at clinically relevant concentrations of 10⁵ bacteria/mL using bacteria-specific and universal probes. We validated the diagnostic technology using 115 positive and 19 negative samples from patients with Escherichia coli, Proteus mirabilis, and Klebsiella pneumoniae infections. The assay successfully identified the infecting pathogen (specificity: >98% and sensitivity: 51-73%) in 3 h. Our platform is faster than culturing and can wirelessly store and transmit results at the cost of $0.38 per assay.