An international, multi-institutional team of researchers that included Guillaume Lambert, a Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in Applied and Engineering Physics at the College of Engineering, has developed a low-cost, rapid paper-based diagnostic system for strain-specific detection of the Zika virus, with the goal that it could soon be used in the field to screen blood, urine, or saliva samples.
A team made up of experts from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Toronto, Arizona State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Boston University, Cornell University and Addgene joined their efforts to quickly prototype a rapid diagnostic test to detect the Zika virus.
“The growing global health crisis caused by the Zika virus propelled us to leverage novel technologies we have developed in the lab and use them to create a workflow that could diagnose a patient with Zika, in the field, within 2-3 hours,” said James Collins, Ph.D. at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and one of the study’s authors.
This summary has been adapted from the original article published in CornellEngineering. Read the full article here.