The development of equipment that requires extensive fluid manipulation, such as analytical diagnostic tools, has generally lagged behind those of a purely electromechanical nature, even though obvious demand exists in areas as diverse as medicine, environmental monitoring, food safety, and counter-terrorism. We propose a self-contained, miniaturized bioassay system that is capable of simultaneously detecting and quantifying the presence of 6 to 10 analytes in a single sample of less than 500 microliters volume. Such a diagnostic device has clear applicability to many industrial, medical and military sectors. This handheld, multi-analyte, wet-chemistry diagnostic system will measure diverse water-borne analytes at concentrations ranging to below one part per billion. The system will be constructed by the integration of state-of-the-art digital and analog circuitry with novel miniaturized fluid handling technologies, optics, and highly specific antibody-based assay techniques. All analyte-specific assay components will be incorporated in a disposable molded plastic coupon, allowing the system to detect and quantify a wide range of chemicals, proteins, viruses, bacteria and biological fragments by simply changing coupons. The proposed system allows coupon re-use until a strong positive showing occurs, greatly reducing costs in applications such as counter-terrorism where most measurements will produce negative responses.
Benefits: Environmental, medical and public safety monitoring applications currently exist and await functional, affordable instrumentation.
Keywords: Planar Waveguides Evanescent Wave Fluoroimmunoassays Biosensor Multi Analyte Bioweapon Detector Micr
