Printed Dots Detect Ebola (And More) Without a Lab
In their new paper in the journal Cell, Keith Pardee, James J. Collins and colleagues from Collins’ lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biological Inspired Engineering talk about networks, printing circuits, programming, and even orthogonality.
They’re not talking about electronics, though. They’re describing how they developed “paper-based synthetic gene networks” into a practical, and potentially revolutionary, diagnostic tool for detecting a wide range of biomolecular targets such as glucose and viruses.
It took them less than a day to produce a slip of paper that can detect the Ebola virus. Armed only with that slip and smartphone camera, a healthcare worker in the field could know within two hours—and sometimes in as little as 20 minutes—whether a patient is infected or not. And the doctor, nurse, or volunteer could do this without advanced skills, extensive sample preparation, expensive reagents, laboratory instruments, or even refrigeration.
More: Printed Dots Detect Ebola (And More) Without a Lab - IEEE Spectrum