Portable nanofluidic aptamer SERS instrument for measurement of chemical exposure

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant The goal of this NIH SBIR Phase II effort is to develop a new point of care POC detection platform and methodology for assessment of human exposure to hazardous environmental compounds in the bloodstream Because the mechanisms of transport of such chemicals into the body their differing stabilities and elimination are difficult to model it is much more straightforward to assay for these compounds in the body rather than in the environment The primary innovations in our approach are that a novel optical micro to nano fluidic device will be used along with unique aptamers and Raman reporter molecules to simultaneously measure several classes of compounds in a multiplexed fashion The opto fluidic device is an extremely sensitive surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy SERS nanochannel cartridge that was invented at Texas Aandamp M University by professors Jun Kameoka and Gerard Cot The aptamer functionalization chemistry as well as the overall integrated product will be developed at BioTex Inc with aptamers discovered at sister company Base Pair Biotechnologies The device being developed provides signal enhancements equal to or exceeding at the entrance to the nanochannel enabling rapid quantitation of femtomolar or smaller levels of targets in fluids As demonstrated in Phase I the individual components of the system have been thoroughly tested and the Phase II study will therefore focus on the engineering integration and demonstration of overall system performance The resonant SERS reporting and nanofluidic concentrator employed have the potential to provide orders of magnitude improved sensitivity over standard fluorescence and without the complicated multistep tasks of ELISA or full analytical chemistry analysis such as chromatography and mass spectrometry Using aptamers to virtually any environmental compound of concern the fully developed platform will be able to provide quantitative andquot point of careandquot or field results in a matter of minutes PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE The goal of this research is to develop a new point of care POC detection platform and methodology for assessment of biological exposure to harmful chemical compounds In contrast to most prior approaches which attempt to measure the amount of such compounds in the environment the technology developed here will have the sensitivity and specificity to detect toxic agents in human blood samples directly and thereby determine the toxicological andquot loadandquot within the patient The end product of this research is expected to have considerable impact allowing toxicologists environmental health professionals and clinicians the ability to correlate the effects of toxic chemicals to disease states