Using swarms of pinhead-sized magnets inside a handheld, all-in-one lab kit, UCLA researchers have developed a technology that might significantly increase the speed and volume of disease testing, while reducing the prices and usage of scarce supplies.

The automated tests could be easily manufactured, deployed and performed timely at a physician’s office, health clinic or at mass testing sites in airports and schools on the onset of any major infectious disease. The UCLA-led research team was motivated by the dearth of equitable access to testing throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when only a handful of clinical laboratories were authorized to run tests. The technology breakthrough could help the authorities higher prepare for future pandemics by decentralizing testing and maximizing the usage of resources.

UCLA Samueli School of Engineering professor Dino Di Carlo of bioengineering and associate professor Sam Emaminejad of electrical and computer engineering co-authored a study, which was published this week in Nature. The paper outlined how the lab kit works and included findings from a clinical study with test samples from individuals who experienced COVID-19 symptoms. Greater than 100 test results using the lab kit were in comparison with the identical samples tested for COVID-19 using polymerase chain response (PCR)-based molecular diagnostics performed as a part of UCLA Health’s routine clinical care.

“Our handheld lab technology could help overcome among the barriers of scarcity and access to tests, especially early in a pandemic, when it’s most vital to regulate disease spread,” said Emaminejad, who also holds a school appointment in bioengineering. “And beyond its potential to handle problems with short supplies and high demand, it could possibly be broadly adapted to check for a lot of kinds of diseases in field and with lab-grade quality.”

Using a circuit board that controls a set of movable, 1-millimeter-sized magnetic discs generally known as “ferrobots” to move samples through the diagnostic workflow of a nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT), the researchers’ ultra-sensitive lab kit was capable of detect the presence of genetic material from a virus -; on this case, SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19. The steps to separate, sort, mix and amplify testing samples are all automated and performed at a miniaturized level contained in the kit.

This platform’s compact design and automatic handling of samples enable easy implementations of pooled testing where you may test dozens of patient samples at the identical time, and all with the identical materials it currently takes to check only one patient. For instance, you can test students in a whole college residence hall with just a number of dozen test kits.”

Dino Di Carlo, UCLA’s Armond and Elena Hairapetian Chair in Engineering and Medicine

By designing the kit for pooled testing, the system requires much lower amounts of reagent chemicals than those needed for testing the samples individually. As much as 16 samples were combined and tested without delay within the team’s study. If the pooled test showed a positive result, subsequent tests would robotically happen throughout the same platform until the actual positive samples were identified. This whole process took between 30 to 60 minutes, depending on whether there have been positive samples. Due to the technology’s assay miniaturization and pooled-testing capabilities, the chemical reagent costs could possibly be reduced by 10 to 300 times.

Apart from with the ability to test for several diseases concurrently, the platform also offers precision and robust automation. For instance, in a pooled-testing with 16 samples, greater than 300 lab operations, including mixing and sorting, were automated by the ferrobots -; that’s greater than 3,000 individual movements, or actuations. Of their reliability studies, the researchers showed that the ferrobots could perform greater than 8 million actuations without mistakes.

Along with Di Carlo and Emaminejad, who’re each faculty members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, the lead authors on this study are UCLA postdoctoral researcher Haisong Lin, and graduate students Wenzhuo Yu and Kiarash Sabet -; all are members of Emaminejad’s Interconnected & Integrated Bioelectronics Lab at UCLA.

Other authors are UCLA engineering graduate students Michael Bogumil, Jacob Hambalek and Shuyu Lin; and postdoctoral researcher Yichao Zhao; in addition to UCLA Health’s assistant clinical professor Sukantha Chandrasekaran and associate clinical professor Omai Garner of pathology and laboratory medicine.

The research was supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation’s COVID-19 Research Award Program, the National Science Foundation and the Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations (PATHS-UP) NSF Engineering Research Center. The UCLA Nanoelectronics Research Facility provided access to the fabrication equipment used for the study. Lin, Yu, Sabet, Di Carlo and Emaminejad have submitted a patent application through the UCLA Technology Development Group for the technology utilized in the brand new system.

Source:

University of California – Los Angeles

Journal reference:

Lin, H., et al. (2022) Ferrobotic swarms enable accessible and adaptable automated viral testing. Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05408-3.