Research Project
8514698
ABSTRACT Rapid, high-throughput, and highly accurate identification of potential blood borne diseases will help blood banks to quickly test a very large volume of donated blood, and will help to prevent further infections. Current blood testing has the following issues: 1. Time consuming testing and sample operation that must be performed for all diseases one-by-one. 2. A large sample volume is required that depends on the number of tests. 3. Testing procedure is complicated as the number of tests increase. 4. Complicated operational procedures that must be run by highly trained personnel in molecular laboratories. The recent development of commercially-available assays using nucleic acid amplification test technologies (NAT) have made it possible for blood centers to consider applying these tests to blood donor screening. But NAT test systems, so far, are time intensive, not in multiplexed (> 2) fashion, thus are unsuited to large-scale screening of donor samples for various pathogens. Maxwell Sensors, Inc. (MSI) proposes to combine Helicase-Dependent Amplification and Barcode Magnetic Bead (BMB) technologies to produce a rapid, Simultaneous Assay for Multiple Pathogens in Blood (SAMP-B). With a few drops of a donor's blood combined with digital magnetic beads in a single microwell, it is possible to simultaneously identify HIV type 1 and 2, Hepatitis B (HBV), Syphilis, Hepatitis C (HCV), Human T-Lymphotropic Virus (HTLV type I and II), West Nile Virus (WNV), and many other blood-borne diseases. During this Phase I project, we have completed all tasks and successfully demonstrated the technical feasibility of simultaneous assay for multiple pathogens by fabricating 128-plex BMBs, integrating the analyzer, and performing HIV, HBV, and Syphilis multiplexed assays. The resulting combined technology is very powerful and will offer the following advantages: (1) Small quantity of sample: a few drops of blood in a microwell are all that's needed to identify multiple target pathogens. It not only determines a reactive sample, but also identifies reactive to what (2) Reduced window period: offers high sensitivity and specificity without the window period associated with antibody based screening technologies (3) Rapid and high throughput: the system can automatically process up to 100 samples per hour - for a maximum of 12,800 reportable results in a 96-microwell format (4) Flexibility: easy addition of new probes for additional screening targets on beads (5) Low cost, easy to use, and high reliability: BMB are low cost, simple operation steps, and batch to batch variation is minimal. In this Phase II project, we will focus on: (1) expand blood-borne pathogens panels from (3-plex to 8-plex) for Blood screening, (2) integrate the sample process with SAMP-B analyzer, and (3) develop and evaluate multiplex pathogens for blood screening.
