Agitation and Temperature Control of Sample Wells in Bio-Layer Interferometry.
Was the beginning of the worldwide pandemic from the SARS-CoV2 virus, known as COVID-19. This shut down the United States along with the rest of the world. At first, to civilians it was a mere 2-week paid vacation, a surprise break from school or just time to revisit hobbies. However, it turned into an extended quarantine now lasting over a year and counting that will affect our lives forever. At this time, the focus was to reduce overwhelmed hospitals and promote communal mask wearing to reduce the risk of transmission as the death and infected cases rose. This novel virus causes mild symptoms in most, but can cause severe illness and death in older adults and people with certain underlying medical conditions. Currently, the United States has over 29 million cases and over 500 thousand deaths. One of our best defenses against the virus is diagnostic and screening tests. According to the CDC, testing helps in identifying infected persons to provide them the necessary care as well as identifying asymptomatic persons who need to isolate, helping slow the spread of infection. The two main test methods used are reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and antigen tests. RT-PCR tests are highly sensitive, but usually need to be processed in a lab and can take 1-3 days to return results. Antigen tests are less sensitive and may need to be confirmed with RT-PCR, but can be used at point-of-care and return results in 15-50 minutes. There is a need for a testing method that is sensitive, fast, inexpensive, and can be used at point-of-care or at home.
Is to merge biochemistry and photonic chip technology to enable ubiquitous point-of-need and at-home diagnostics. The first device SiPhox is working on is called OneLab that houses professional lab grade instruments directly into users' hands for at-home diagnostics. This design is a portable reader that receives disposable cartridges that users' spit into so the device can analyze it and determine a diagnosis if applicable. Aligning with this, SiPhox is developing a highly scalable COVID-19 test using a single CMOS chip factory that can produce enough chips to test all 7.8 Billion people monthly.
Entails our team to construct an easily alterable prototype that is highly efficient, alternatively cheaper, and is composed of lightweight material for an optional portable capability to use for Medical diagnostic tests requiring fluid samples. Due to COVID-19’s impact on the United States healthcare system resulting in limited testing supplies that resulted in long wait times, our device would be capable of increasing the sampling rate to 96 samples at once to reduce post-test waiting while under a fully automated vibration and thermal cooling system to induce mixing and keep the bodily fluid specimens at room temperature or lower. Because of the severity of COVID-19, our team will not be working directly with testing COVID-positive samples but rather deionized water and dye to test the mechanics of the system. To test the accuracy of achieving homogenous agitation, the device will be equipped with bio-layer interferometry (BLI) to measure the shift of interference patterns of white light when the thickness of the biosensor tip changes due to added biological layers, in this case, the added dye. Our team will research competing products on the market to compare and add higher value to our intended design as well as look at material choice and part components to build the prototype. We will then follow with 3D modeling our system using SolidWorks to physically represent our design dimensions and schematics. Once finalized, we will utilize already fabricated components such as thermocouples to sensor the temperature, motors to induce agitation, and sheets of aluminum to build our housing. After completing a physical build of our prototype our team will test the vibration and thermal systems to fix any issues and finalize the results. This will be carried out starting September 2020 and ending in June 2021.
Scroll through the images to see our teams progress on our prototype over the academic year where the leftmost picture is from September 2020 progressing up until our group finished in June 2021.
SiPhox had already started to create a device that reduces possible transmission risks from going to get tested by testing from the comfort of your own home. This device, OneLab, uses integrated microfluidics to prepare and deliver patient samples to arrays of biophotonic silicon waveguide sensors. Initially, our team was tasked to design microfluidic chips.
The start of the pandemic leading to societial changes had intiated our team to want to support Healthcare workers by providing better testing options. Reflecting on our teams skills, we decided to focus on how the samples are analyzed. From this, we discussed with SiPhox to get their input and decided to make an automated device relying on bio-layer interferometry to increase the sampling rate, mix the samples, and to allow the user to change the temperature and maintain the temperature.
After researching the market for similar design our team found:
1) Opentrons: There device is quite expensive and was only compatible for large scale testing.
2) Creative Biolabs: There machine was only availble for drug discovery and research lab settings than for commerical use.
3)ForteBio: There device was heavy and not made to be portable.
SiPhox had requested that our device will agitate the liquid and control the temperature. To achieve this our team will:
1) Use multiple thermocouples to measure the temperature at various points on the 96 well-plate to determine the suffiecient time for the liquid to reach the optimum temperature and then use a feedback loop to control the cooling elements output.
2) Analyze the time it takes for the dye to sufficiently mix in the vials until homogenous for finding the agitation parameter.
3)Determine how accuractely we can measure and maintain the temperature below 20 degrees Celsius to the users desired temperature.
Intends to allow SiPhox to make use of our prototype for rapid development of SiPhox’s at-home testing device. The prototype at hand intends to do what has limited our populations by allowing for the rapid testing with results in an hour. Currently the anticipated build cost for one of our prototypes is $1,200 which is less than half of the others in competition.
The end product from SiPhox will apply beyond COVID-19, the device will be able to test for other viruses using CRISPR-based RNA sensing at a percentage of the cost of similar tests. The target market is towards households around the world. And priced at $100 USD per handheld device and a mere $1 the SiPhox solution is revolutionary compared to the near hundred dollar per test of other companies ignoring their reusable state of the art equipment.
Imagine how effective an at-home test for the next viral pandemic could be at preventing the spreading of the diseases that prove to be lethal.
Our biggest competitors are ForteBio’s Octet RED96 system and Opentrons’s Temperature Module GEN2. Similarly to our device, the Octet RED96 system measures the concentration of biomolecules in a 96-well plate using biolayer interferometry. However, their device weighs 63 lbs, making it difficult to transport. Our completed device is predicted to weigh ()lbs, making it easily portable. The Temperature Module GEN2 holds reagents at a specific temperature specified by the user. The device has a temperature accuracy of +/- 1℃ which is more precise than our +/- 5℃ acceptance criteria. It also has a greater temperature range of 5℃-95℃ while our design aims to maintain samples below 20℃ at a temperature specified by the user. However, the GEN2 does not agitate samples and costs $2500 while the build costs of our device is expected to be $1200.
Listed below are the team members of the BioEngine program and their engineering mentor from SiPhox. Each team member is a senior at the University of California, Irvine either majoring in material science or biomedical engineering.
Materials Science Engineering, MSE
Responsible for Programming and Electronics
Email: hmuskat@uci.edu
Materials Science Engineering, MSE
Responsible for Prototyping
Email: ijahmed@uci.edu
Materials Science Engineering, MSE
Responsible for 3D Modeling
Email: kplawson@uci.edu
Materials Science Engineering, MSE
Responsible for Research
Email: mejiaa5@uci.edu
Biomedical Engineering, BME
Responsible for Testing
Email: speftekh@uci.edu
Engineering Mentor
Co-Founder and CCO of SiPhox, Inc.
Contact through SiPhox