Advanced Development for Defense Science and Technology

The objective of our proposed effort is to demonstrate the feasibility of an extremely rapid analysis of whole blood samples in non-laboratory environments using MEMS-based fabrication techniques combined with new developments in highly specific antibodies. We believe this technology will enable the realization of a small handheld portable blood analysis system with a quick response time, which will have direct and enormous impact for military field hospitals and mass casualty situations. Our development strategy is to first demonstrate the feasibility of the technology and, after successfully demonstrating our technology, to conduct a full-scale multiple year development effort that will be completed with the delivery of a fully-functional and self-contained blood typing and recipient/donor crossmatching analysis device requiring less than one-drop of blood and having an analysis time of 1 minute or less. During the SBIR effort, we will address those issues we believe have the highest risks associated with our technology, namely whether the basic concept functions to an acceptable level in a microscale fabricated device and whether the analysis time can be reduced to 1 minute or less, which is far below that which is possible with current approaches and technologies.