Engineering Prof. Samuel Sia Develops Mobile Device for Faster HIV Testing

Using innovative lab-on-a-chip technology, Samuel K. Sia, PhD , associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a way to not only check a patient's HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central healthcare records-10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device (pictured at right) was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from the Sia lab and ICAP at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. In the study published online January 18, 2013, in Clinical Chemistry , and in the print April 2013 issue, Sia describes a major advance towards providing people in remote areas of the world with laboratory-quality diagnostic services traditionally available only in centralized healthcare settings. "We've built a handheld mobile device that can perform laboratory-quality HIV testing, and do it in just 15 minutes and on finger-pricked whole blood," Sia says. "And, unlike current HIV rapid tests, our device can pick up positive samples normally missed by lateral flow tests, and automatically synchronize the test results with patient health records across the globe using both the cell phone and satellite networks." Sia collaborated with Claros Diagnostics (a company he co-founded, now called OPKO Diagnostics) to develop a pioneering strategy for an integrated microfluidic-based diagnostic device-the mChip-that can perform complex laboratory assays, and do so with such simplicity that these tests can easily be carried out anywhere, including in resource-limited settings, at a very low cost.