Virus World

Researchers have created and tested a miniature virus-scanning device for smartphones that is 100 times more sensitive than commercial influenza testing kits. Yoshihiro Minagawa from the University of Tokyo is behind the new device, called MobIP, which aims to make diagnosis and disease prevention easier for communities in hard to reach areas that may not have the funds to access leading virus detection equipment.

 

The new device operates with a smartphone inserted into the top so that its camera looks through a small lens and into the inside of the device. Minagawa and his research team developed a smartphone app that would then show the collection of viruses, held in place in minuscule cavities and made visible with LED lights. These cavities are just 48 femtoliters (quadrillionths of a liter) in size.

 

As the study explains, “To achieve low noise fluorescence imaging with a simple optical setup, we employed evanescent field illumination by introducing incident light from the side of a femtoliter reactor ray device (FRAD).  “Given two equal samples containing influenza, our system detected about 60 percent of the number of viruses as the fluorescence microscope. But it’s must faster at doing so and more than adequate to produce good estimates for accurate diagnoses,” Minagawa said. “What’s really amazing is that our device is about 100 times more sensitive than a commercial rapid influenza test kit, and it’s not just limited to that kind of virus.” 

 

Although Minagawa notes that there are further improvements to be made to the device, including optimizing the optical system to improve spatial distortions and resolution, his study states that his new device is “suitable for a new generation of point-of-care testing, enabling extremely sensitive detection of the influenza virus, and therefore diagnostic tests at the early phase of infection.”

 

Invention reported in the journal Lab on a Chip:

https://doi.org/10.1039/c9lc00370c