Engineering researchers have developed a device for detecting bacterial particles that cause diseases, an advance that would help improve how clinicians isolate novel coronavirus.
The next-generation miniature lab device designed at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) uses magnetic nano-beads to isolate biological microparticles, drug-resistant strains of bacterial infections and difficult-to-detect micro-particles such as those making up Ebola and coronaviruses.
The device is a sophisticated lab environment that can be used in field hospitals or clinics and should be much faster at collecting and analysing specimens than the commercially available membrane filters. Its wide, shallow channels trap small bacteria molecules that are attracted to packed, magnetic microparticles.
Ke Du and Blanca Lapizco-Encinas, both faculty-researchers in RIT's Kate Gleason College of Engineering, worked with an international team to collaborate on the design of the new system--a microfluidic device, essentially a lab-on-a-chip.
Drug-resistant bacterial infections are causing hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world every year, and this number is continuously increasing. Based on a report from the United Nations, the deaths caused by antibiotics resistance could reach to 10 million annually by 2050, Du explained.
"It is urgent for us to better detect, understand, and treat these diseases. To provide rapid and accurate detection, the sample purification and preparation is critical and essential, that is what we are trying to contribute. We are proposing to use this novel device for virus isolation and detection such as the coronavirus and Ebola," said Du, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering whose background is in development of novel biosensors and gene editing technology.
The lab team is interested in the detection of bacterial infection, especially in bodily fluids. One of the major problems for detection is how to better isolate higher concentrations of pathogens.
