Summary:
UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed a cost-effective cellphone-based micro-plate reader to rapidly perform antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) with >99% accuracy.
Background:
Immunoassays are biochemical tests that are conducted to measure the presence and concentration of large proteins or antibodies in a sample. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is a critical component of diagnostic testing within a heath care setting to mitigate the spread of dangerous bacteria. Commonly, an ELISA test is utilized to perform AST for accurate antibody or antigen recognition for the diagnosis of many important infectious diseases. Standard ELISA procedures may utilize microliter plates (i.e. 96-well plates) to analyze samples via colorimetric readouts. These colorimetric assays correlate color changes from chemical reactions to specific quantities of substrates. However, current preparation and analysis of ELISA tests require large integrated infrastructure that include robotic systems and multi-well scanning spectrophotometers, which are generally only available in high resource capacity regions. There is a pressing need for a fast and cost-effective method to analyze ELISA immunoassays to increase accessibility for point-of-care AST in developing regions.
Innovation:
UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed a cost-effective and hand-held smartphone-based ELISA immunoassay reader. The immunoassay reader is capable of performing rapid monitoring of microliter plates and analyzing the colorimetric changes of the ELISA test. The reader contains a unique optical fiber array-based smartphone attachment to capture the transmitted light from each well by the smartphone camera. Furthermore, compared to other micro-plate readers, the design provides a significantly more compact and light-weight imaging platform that did not suffer from optical aberrations. The developed device achieves high accuracy of >99% for four different clinical ELISA tests. This innovation could aid in increasing accessibility of high-throughput immunoassay testing to healthcare systems with insufficient resources to perform routine AST in clinical settings.
Potential Applications:
• Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST)
• Point-of-care testing
• Epidemiological studies
• Antibody screening
Advantages:
• Cost-effective
• 3D-printed design
• Rapid analysis (results in ~1min)
• High accuracy
• Integrates with handheld device
• Light weight/portable device
• Removes need for expensive diagnostic infrastructure
Development to Date:
First successful demonstration by analysis of four common clinical ELISA tests (measles IgG, mumps IgG, and 2 types of herpes simple virus IgG.
Related Papers:
Berg, B.; Cortazar, B.; Tseng, D.; Ozkan, H.; Feng, S.; Wei, Q.; Chan, R. Y.; Burbano, J.; Farooqui, Q.; Lewinski, M.; Di Carlo, D.; Garner, O. B.; Ozcan, A. “Cellphone-based hand-held microplate reader for point-of-care testing of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays”. ACS Nano. 9, 7857-7866, (2015).
UCLA Case Nos:
2015-672 Cellphone-Based Hand-Held Micro-Plate Reader for Point-Of-Care Elisa Testing and 2017-092 High-Throughput and Automated Diagnosis of Antimicrobial Resistance Using a Cost-Effective Cellphone-Based Micro-Plate Reader