SBIR-STTR Award

Per- and Polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) pose a significant health risk to the United States sincethese chemicals are persistent toxic bio-accumulative and ubiquitous.PFAS are commonly foundin ground and surface waters which can lead to elevated levels of PFAS in agricultural products.To protect the safety of the nation's food and water supply more frequent and widespread PFAStesting is necessary.Currently methods to detect these chemicals are primarily laboratory-basedand the rapid methods that exist have significant limitations.Here we propose a rapidquantitative sensitive test for PFAS that will detect many of these chemicals simultaneously.Thetest will be based on a competitive immunoassay using peroxisome proliferator-activated receptoralpha (PPARα) which binds to PFAS.The immunoassay will be developed on the LightDeckplatform which uses waveguide technology to perform rapid easy-to-use immunoassays with afluorescent readout that is digitally processed to provide a numeric result to users.The primaryobjective of this proposal is the development of an immunoassay based on PPARα binding toPFAS.Assay range and reproducibility will be measured to ensure that the assay meets customerneeds.The test platform has already been developed and is used in LightDeck's commercializedMC + CYN Test.The test is expected to have a lower limit well below the actionable regulatoryguidelines for these chemicals.This test will be used in agriculture water utilities andmanufacturing industries to ensure the safety of the US water supply.