MASc seminar - Tianchi Ma

Candidate

Tianchi Ma

Supervisor

Christopher Backhouse

Title

An Automated Hand-held RFLP-CE Diagnosis Device for point-of-care Applications

Abstract

Micro-Total-Analysis-System (uTAS) for genetic diagnosis has a great potential to revolutionize the future of health care. However the lack of uTAS, which is fully integrated, mass-producible and application oriented, has delayed uTAS development in real life point-of-care applications.

In this presentation, I will discuss our automatic system developed for a polymer-based diagnosis system capable of sample preparation (SP) and the capillary electrophoresis (CE) based restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). Both processes, SP and CE, are integrated through a novel valve/pumping module, and it is fully capable of hand-free operation. This current system has demonstrated the mutation detection related to hereditary hemochromatosis (HFE). In addition, all of these modules were intended to be developed in a manner that could be implemented in a PMMA chip, or on a future CMOS chip for greater cost reduction.