Chronis Lab

HIV/AIDS Monitoring in the Developing World

HIV/AIDS is one of the most destructive pandemics in recorded human history, responsible for more than 25 million deaths. 26 million people are living with limited or no access to therapeutic treatments, mainly due to the high cost of anti-retroviral therapies and current diagnostic tests as well as due to the lack of basic infrastructure (e.g. lack of electricity, no trained personnel) that can support these diagnostic tests. The need for innovative, inexpensive diagnostic instrumentation technology that can be used in resource-limited settings is immediate.

We propose to develop a portable, inexpensive, battery-operated, MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems)-based, imaging system for counting absolute number of CD4 cells from a microliter of blood sample. We use the term ‘imaging system’ to denote the different approach we follow for counting CD4 cells: rather the reading one by one singles cells (as it is done with flow cytometry), our system can image simultaneously thousands of individual cells, pre-assembled on the surface of a biochip.


Moreover, the proposed single-cell high-throughput imaging technology can be extended to other applications, including cellular diagnostics for cancer screening and drug discovery assays.

Collaborators:

James Riddell (U of Michigan, Medical School)
Mick Savona (U of Texas at San Antonio)

Publications

Anurag Tripathi and Nikos Chronis, A white blood cell capturing biochip using a 3D trapping architecture, ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference 2011.