Portrait of Carolyn Ren
Tuesday, January 14, 2025

MME and Waterloo Pharmacy develop microsensors to detect COVID-19

The collaboration of the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering and Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy has led to an innovative production that will significantly improve the detection of COVID-19.   

The research team consisted of MME professor Dr. Carolyn Ren, and her PhD student Weija Cui and Waterloo Pharmacy professor Dr. Emmanuel Ho and PhD candidate in Pharmacy, Jin Wang.  

The joint effort of this team led to an improved alternative tool to replace the current rapid testing kit, which is widely criticized due to its inaccuracy and limited results. Dr. Ren, the director of the Waterloo Microfluidics Laboratory, helped publish several papers with a similar purpose. Examining other publications and previous studies involving microfluidic systems greatly helped them come to another conclusion for an improved method.   

The team developed a microsensor that is ready-to-use and was produced based on microwave sensing technology. This design allowed them to remove the unnecessary expensive sample extraction procedure, significantly shortening the waiting time and cost of the product. Through various testing methods, it has been proven to successfully detect SARS-CoV-2 particles with high precision.   

Plus, this innovation sparked the success of another. This time in a creative venture, Jin Wang’s generated an illustration to visually represent their research. It is now published on the sixth cover issue of the American Chemical Society Measurement Science Au from ACS Journal where the research between Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering and Waterloo Pharmacy can be found. The team is grateful Wang was able to encompass their research in one image.  

Interested in learning more? More information is available at the Watertoo Pharmacy News  and ACS Publications  where the team expresses further how their research will benefit society with improved measures against COVID-19.