NSF Award
1240410
Intellectual Merit of Proposed Activity:<br/>A portable hybrid sensing system for the rapid detection and identification of toxins and bacteria in blood, urine, and saliva will be developed by combining surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy and light scattering spectroscopy. The unique chemical sensitivity of Raman for toxin detection and the sensitivity of light scattering for bacterial identification in an inexpensive, portable system would provide a powerful and rapid diagnostic tool suitable for emergency, ambulatory or home use. Unintentional drug overdose deaths account for more than 25,000 annual fatalities in the United States. Similarly, bacterial infection results in an even larger number of deaths. Both toxin poisoning and bacterial infection, which can cause sepsis and septic shock, are serious health problems in emergency medicine, affecting millions of people. In life threatening cases of poisoning and bacteremia, the patient survival rate is highly correlated with the speed of identifying the offending agent. Interfacing the system with a portable data transfer device such as a smartphone to quickly transmit results to healthcare providers in a personalized telemedicine manner will allow for the fastest possible treatment times in situations that need them most. The combination of toxin and bacterial identification in a single system has the potential to decrease or eliminate the need for several major time-consuming diagnostic tests that require large expensive instruments and advanced facilities. This system will allow rapid, reliable, and inexpensive identification of virtually all biologically dangerous compounds and will surpass the limited number of toxins which current large and expensive clinical instruments can detect. Similarly, blood culture technology for identifying the bacterial species in an infection takes several days, with some strains taking up to five days to be detected, or simply failing to culture entirely. In cases of severe sepsis, this slow procedure results in a patient survival of approximately 40%. Additionally, the rapid classification of bacterial infections has a likelihood of reducing the emergence of bacterial strains with antibiotic resistance. The proposed flexible system will be transformative in nature, will have an immediate impact on the mortality rates in life-threatening circumstances, and could also have a profound influence on the future of healthcare delivery.<br/><br/>Broader Impact of Proposed Activity:<br/>The developed instrumentation will serve as a research and educational tool for clinical fellows specializing in emergency and laboratory medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and by Harvard Biological and Biomedical Science Program graduate students in their thesis research projects. It will also be made available to other educational institutions for use in collaborative projects. The project also involves summer undergraduate and high school students to work on sub-topics in the research and development related to the device. Material related to the rapid identification of chemical toxins and blood stream infections with the proposed system will be incorporated in two courses at Harvard. The results of this work will also be disseminated broadly through peer-reviewed journal publications and international conference presentations. The Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging and Photonics is dedicated to the integration of members of under-represented groups. One key goal is to have women and minorities as active postdocs and/or graduate students in all research groups. The combined flexible system will benefit society in three ways. First, a substantial decrease in the cost and complexity of operation of the diagnostic tests will reduce the cost of healthcare. Second, the presence of fast tests for toxin and bacterial identification will save tens of thousands of lives. Third, the proposed system will reduce the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, which would help alleviate one of the largest and most expensive emerging healthcare issues.
