Advanced Liquid Logic announced that it has received a large, four-year contract from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, for the development of a rapid, point-of-care, diagnostic device for the detection of HIV in low resource settings.

Advanced Liquid Logic co-founder and the HIV study’s Principal Investigator Michael Pollack said, “Our substantial developmental progress and the promise of a sample-to-answer solution in molecular diagnostics made this award possible. Molecular diagnostics is a great application for digital microfluidics because the technology is uniquely positioned to provide highly complex testing capability in a compact and easy to use instrument.”

Advanced Liquid Logic will award a major subcontract to principal investigators Thomas Denny and Georgia Tomaras, Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI), to support the development of viral load and antibody measurements and field trials. Thomas Denny, said, “This is an exciting opportunity to work toward development of an accurate and affordable test for use in monitoring HIV/AIDS patients in resource challenged areas.”

In recent years HIV/AIDS treatment medications have become more available globally but many areas of the world lack access to reliable treatment monitoring. “Pending successful development, the application of this new technology in low income countries could mean the difference between life and death for many people,” said Michael Merson, director of the Duke Global Health Institute. “This is yet another example of an exciting, innovative technology originating at Duke.”

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHSN272200900030C.

About Advanced Liquid Logic, Inc.

Advanced Liquid Logic was founded to develop and exploit a new technology for micro-liquid-handling called digital microfluidics which was pioneered at Duke University. Small droplets are flexibly manipulated electrically under software control to perform even the most complex liquid-based testing. Portable equipment without pumps, valves, or pipes is used in conjunction with a disposable lab-on-a-chip. Advanced Liquid Logic is developing its first commercial products for the research and clinical diagnostics markets.

Source
The Duke Human Vaccine Institute

Cell phones have come a long way in the last decade. Today, one can talk, text message, shoot photos and video, send and receive e-mail, and even access the Web. Now imagine a cell phone that can be used to monitor diseases like HIV or malaria and to test water quality after a major disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.

Aydogan Ozcan, assistant professor of electrical engineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been working to make this cell phone-turned-mobile medical lab a reality. The proliferation of such devices could alter the direction of health care in the developing world, as well as in industrialized nations, in the next several years.

The great promise of Ozcan’s work has earned him several prestigious honors for young scientists, most recently the 2009 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Given to young faculty by the National Institutes of Health, the award includes funding of $1.5 million over five years to support highly innovative research projects.

“It is an honor to receive such an award from the NIH,” said Ozcan, who is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. “This award will be invaluable in my efforts to create a revolutionary device that is capable of significantly improving health care in the long-run by increasing the throughput and speed of nano-imaging.”

This NIH award program is specifically designed to support creative new investigators with highly innovative research ideas at an early stage in their career, when they may lack the preliminary data required for traditional grants. The review process emphasizes creativity, innovative research approaches and the potential of a given project to have a significant impact on an important biomedical or behavioral research problem.

Ozcan will use the NIH award to further his research, exploring new ways to image and sense nanoscale events using compact imaging architectures that can potentially be interfaced with standard cell phones.

“This research has the potential for global impact, and we are very excited that the NIH has recognized both Professor Ozcan and his work,” said Paul S. Weiss, director of the CNSI.

“Aydogan’s work has great potential in transforming mobile phones into portable yet powerful medical devices,” said Vijay K. Dhir, dean of UCLA Engineering. “The significant attention he’s received for his research is well deserved and is a testament to the quality of young faculty we have here at the school.”

In Ozcan’s lab, a prototype cell phone diagnostic unit has been constructed that utilizes LUCAS, an innovative lens-free, high-throughput imaging platform. LUCAS (Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell Monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging) first uses a light source to illuminate a sample of blood, saliva or other fluid. Then, with a sensor array, a “shadow image” - essentially a diffraction pattern - is obtained of the microparticles in the sample, such as red blood cells.

Because red blood cells and other microparticles have a distinct diffraction pattern, they can be identified and counted virtually instantaneously by LUCAS using a custom-developed “decision algorithm” that compares the captured shadow images to a library of images. Data collected by LUCAS can then be sent to a hospital for analysis and diagnosis using the cell phone, or transferred by USB to a computer for transmission to a hospital.

The compact, lightweight and portable nature of LUCAS makes the potential impact of Ozcan’s mobile lab very exciting. Currently, microscopes and advanced medical lab equipment, like flow cytometers, represent the standard for examining, identifying and counting cells. But they are bulky, cost tens of thousands of dollars and require trained technicians to operate.

“With LUCAS, we were able to simplify the imaging device. And because LUCAS does not require a lens, we were also able to increase the visual field to a few hundred times larger than the area that can be seen under a microscope,” Ozcan said. “LUCAS really provides a capability that doesn’t exist today.”

Resource-poor areas, like parts of Africa, India and Brazil, would benefit enormously from having tools that could diagnose and monitor diseases in the field. Today, the great distances between people in need of health care and the facilities capable of providing it still pose a major obstacle to improving health.

According to Ozcan, the LUCAS platform can be produced rather inexpensively - parts cost less than $10 - and all one needs is a simple camera phone. In developed nations like the United States, point-of-care testing can potentially be done by LUCAS as well, reducing the cost and frequency of visits to the doctor’s office and to labs.

Specifically, for HIV patients, the phone can be used to measure CD4 or CD8 cells in a person’s blood to determine if an HIV patient has AIDS; or a red blood cell count can determine if someone is anemic or might have malaria. Further, in the event of a disaster in which water quality may be compromised, the cell phone can be used to detect hazardous microparticles that might have contaminated drinking water.

To broaden the applications of LUCAS, Ozcan’s next goal is to modify the imaging platform so that it is able to detect low concentrations of bacteria, at levels of 100 to 1,000 bacteria per milliliter. Ozcan says he is confident that when merged with nanotechnology, LUCAS can be enhanced to analyze nanoparticles like viruses, proteins and even DNA.

In addition to the New Innovator Award, Ozcan, 30, was also recently named one of Technology Review’s top young innovators under the age of 35. The magazine honors technologists and scientists whose work they believe is changing the world.

Source:
Wileen Wong Kromhout

University of California - Los Angeles

“While condoms are excellent at preventing the transmission of HIV, it’s often difficult for women to negotiate their use,” says principal investigator Betsy C. Herold, M.D., professor of pediatrics, of microbiology & immunology, and of obstetrics & gynecology and women’s health at Einstein. “It’s imperative that women have alternative strategies available to protect their own health. Our belief is that an intravaginal ring that delivers a combination of drugs is the best strategy.”

Vaginal rings are soft, plastic, doughnut-shaped devices designed to provide controlled release of drugs to the vagina over extended periods. At present, there are several models available for delivering contraceptives, but none for microbicides.

Dr. Herold and her colleagues will evaluate several anti-HIV microbicides, ultimately aiming for a two-drug combination. “Over the last decade, we’ve learned that when you expose HIV to a single drug, you make it easier to select for resistance,” she says. “So, we are trying to target HIV infection at two different steps very early in its life cycle, which should prevent the establishment of any infection.”

One of the drugs to be evaluated is tenofovir, which blocks reverse transcriptase, an enzyme crucial to HIV reproduction. Tenofovir is used currently as an oral systemic therapy against HIV, but it has also shown promise as a topical microbicide. The team will also test the efficacy of two so-called fusion inhibitors, including maraviroc and PIE12-trimer, which block the virus from entering target immune cells by different mechanisms.

The team will pay particular attention to choosing microbicides that preserve natural vaginal defenses against HIV. In recent years, supposedly safe microbicides were found to make women more susceptible to HIV infection. As Dr. Herold demonstrated in an earlier study, these microbicides most likely failed because they disrupted the vagina’s epithelial lining, which provides a protective barrier against infection.

“We want to preserve that protective barrier while adding drugs that will be at the right place at the right time when the virus presents,” says Dr. Herold. “That is why a ring, which can provide sustained delivery of the microbicide over three to four weeks, would be ideal. People wouldn’t have to remember to use it, which is a problem with gels and pills. Also, we don’t know if oral medications will get to the right place - some drugs get into the genital tract well, but some don’t.” The ring under development could be replaced monthly without a doctor’s supervision.

The microbicides will be incorporated into vaginal ring under development at the University of Utah, Department of Bioengineering, which is collaborating on the study.

“We’ve deliberately chosen to focus on drugs that have already been approved for systemic use or are far along in the regulatory process. This should shorten the time it takes to begin clinical trials. We know that every day that goes by, more people are getting infected with HIV,” says Dr. Herold. The researchers hope to start Phase I clinical testing within the next four years.

The need for a microbicide-releasing vaginal ring is especially urgent in sub-Saharan Africa, where the infection rate among 15 to 49 year-olds exceeds 23 percent in some countries. AIDS is the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa and women account for six out of ten of those living with HIV. “But this is not just a global health problem,” says Dr. Herold. “This is a problem here in the U.S. The rates of HIV in certain regions in this country parallel the rates in many areas of developing world”.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national infection rate in the United States is 1 percent; in D.C., it is 3 percent, and in the Bronx, 1.7 percent. While men still have higher rates of infection than women in the U.S., AIDS is a common killer for women - ranking third after cancer and heart disease. As of 2007, there were 9,000 women with HIV/AIDS living in the Bronx.

Marla J. Keller, M.D., associate professor of medicine and of obstetrics & gynecology and women’s health at Einstein is a co-investigator on the study. Dr. Keller is a leader in clinical studies on microbicide safety and the impact microbicides have on female genital tract mucosal immunity in HIV-infected and uninfected women. In addition to Dr. Herold, Patrick Kiser, associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Utah, is also a principle investigator on the study. Two biotechnology firms, ImQuest BioSciences, Inc. in Frederick, Maryland, and Particle Sciences, Inc. in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, are also involved in the study.

Source:
Deirdre Branley

Albert Einstein College of Medicine