Soper to Present at PITTCON Conference & Expo 2021
Steven A. Soper, Director of CBM2, will give a presentation titled “Diagnosing COVID-19 using Microfluidic Enrichment and Label-Free Counting of SARS-CoV-2 Particles” on Thursday, March 11, 2021 from 2:40-3:15 PM (EST) during session number S03-03 of the PITTCON 2021 Virtual Event.
In this presentation, he will discuss his team’s development of a plastic chip smaller than the size of a credit card, which is mass produced via injection molding, to enrich and count the number of enriched viral particles using affinity selection and label-free counting, respectively. The chip can accept any clinical sample (saliva, throat or nasal swabs) and search for viral particles (VPs) in a clinical sample, and then count the number of VPs using a label-free approach. The chip will affinity enrich SARS-CoV-2 particles and count them using an on-chip nano-Coulter Counter in <15 minutes in a fully automated fashion using the handheld instrument. The instrument accepts the plastic chip tailored for a specific VP using an affinity agent, which in this case is a highly stable DNA aptamer that is chemically attached to the plastic chip. The aptamer specifically recognizes the SARS-CoV-2 particles. The chip consists of 1.5 million pillars that allows for affinity loading 1 to billions of SARS-CoV-2 particles. Following surface-enrichment, the VPs can be released from the capture surface using a photocleavable linker that can be cleaved using a simple blue-light LED. In addition, the enriched particles are available for molecular analysis of their RNA using for example RT-qPCR but with little or no interference from human RNA. Due to the handheld nature of Soper’s technology, its full sample processing automation, and the need for no reagents, it can be used for wide-scale screening. Also, because the chip can be programmed for a specific target by changing the identity of the affinity agent, it will find a plethora of applications, for example enrichment and counting of exosomes for health-related scenarios (cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, bacterial infections, or other viral particles besides SARS-CoV-2).