An Acoustofluidic Device for Point of Care Sputum Processing and Analysis

Project Summary Asthma is a chronic lung disease that causes the airways in the lungs to become inflamed making it difficult to breathe and leading to episodes of intense coughing and wheezing The prevalence of asthma has increased rapidly over the past several decades and more than in Americans are now living with the disease While there is no cure for asthma the symptoms of the disease can be managed through a series of prescription medicines However this conventional one size fits all therapeutic approach fails to account for the different clinical forms and phenotypes of asthma which have been the subject of many recent medical studies By analyzing the different cell populations found in sputum the mucus within the airways of the lungs researchers have identified the distinct immunological phenotypes associated with the disease Identifying these phenotypes has led to hopes of developing individually tailored therapeutic treatments that will more effectively target the mechanisms unique to each phenotype Although sputum analysis has proven to be a powerful tool that provides a noninvasive means of characterizing the different variations of asthma the current methods for processing and analyzing sputum are complex and labor intensive The multi step process requires highly trained personnel and the amount of sputum collected from a patient is often too small to perform meaningful analysis In addition the process requires the use of expensive benchtop equipment which prevents point of care applications and limits the analysis to centralized facilities As a result there exists a critical need in the medical community for a more simple and rapid approach for processing and analyzing low volume sputum samples In this SBIR project we will address this unmet need by developing and commercializing acoustofluidic i e the fusion of acoustics and microfluidics technologies for point of care automated sputum processing and analysis In Phase I Ascent has successfully demonstrated the utility and feasibility of the proposed devices by meeting or exceeding the acceptable values of each of the five key parameters identified in the Measures of Success In Phase II our commercialization activities will improve performance of the disposable acoustofluidic chips develop self contained beta testing ready prototypes and validate their performance with a pilot clinical feasibility study The proposed system will have the following features ability to perform accurate sputum analysis over a much wider sample size range volume L than the conventional approaches volume L automation and low turnaround time biohazard containment and low cost point of care devices With these features we expect that once demonstrated the proposed acoustofluidic platform will not only be an excellent replacement for existing sputum processing analysis tools but will also fulfill many unmet needs for applications where the amount of sputum induced from asthmatic patients is not enough to run the standard tests and or the expertise and equipment to perform this analysis are not available such as most practice locations outside of large hospitals Project Narrative The proposed project is to develop tools that can perform automated accurate sputum processing and analysis using low volume samples Advances achieved in the proposed project will be critical in the development of personalized treatments for asthma