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Enhancing lateral flow assays (LFAs) with cationic isotachophoresis for bacterial and viral infection differentiation

Imagine a world where all diseases can be diagnosed anywhere, without the need for specialized medical equipment. Imagine that testing for these diseases is as easy as a pregnancy test. In all healthcare crises, knowing is half the battle, and an accurate diagnosis is the first step to getting effective treatment.  

The problem is that disease diagnostics often include expensive and invasive procedures, meaning that most people don’t have the luxury of knowing the status of their disease early enough when it is at its most treatable. Lateral Flow Assays (LFAs), like pregnancy tests, serve as a proof-of-concept platform for a device that is cost-effective, easy to use, and can be mass distributed. However, these tests are nowhere near sensitive enough to detect disease markers in a complex sample serum.  

In other words, disease diagnostics is like finding a needle in a haystack, and current iterations of LFAs serve this purpose well. However, to detect higher impact markers like those in cancer or viral infections, you need to be able to find that same needle in a haystack the size of a football field, stacked 75 rows high.  

Devon’s research involves improving the sensitivity of these simple paper-based devices. Our strategy is to extract disease markers from complex serum samples based on their electric charges with a process called isotachophoresis. It’s a lot like using a magnet to separate the needles from all the hay. But instead of using magnets, we are using electric fields from a portable coin cell battery to improve the sensitivity of these devices. By incorporating our technique into traditional LFAs, we hope to equip everyone with better diagnostic devices. 

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