Winners of the 2021-2022 William and Rhea Seath Awards Competition
SALIVERA: A FULLY AUTOMATED MOLECULAR TESTING DEVICE FOR RAPID DETECTION OF VIRAL RNA
Professor Sara Mahshid and Dr. Roozbeh Siavash Moakhar, research associate, Bioengineering
Executive Summary
This technology consists of a device for very rapid diagnostic and serological testing in response to urgent needs in the COVID-19 pandemic. The portable and automated electrical acquisition can be coupled to a smartphone, using a smartphone application that can receive the electrical data and interpret the data into reading signals for a digital display. Our approach is cost-effective and does not require skilled operators. The William and Rhea Seath Award (WRSA) will support the fabrication cost of one unit of industrial design of SALIVERA with the aim of testing the device in a hospital -the last critical step before regulatory approval and commercialization.
PATTERN BASED CONTRACTILITY SCREENING IN DRUG DISCOVERY
Pictured Professor Allen Ehrlicher and Ajinkya Ghagre, PhD Candidate, both from Bioengineering; Dr. Ali Amini, postdoctoral fellow, Johanan Idicula (Forces Canada) and Professor Ramaswamy Krishnan (Harvard Medical School)
Executive Summary
Cells exert contractile forces, and defects therein are fundamental to diverse pathologies including cardiomyopathies, skeletal myopathies, vasospasm, bronchospasm, and cancer migration, invasion and metastasis. In each of these disease contexts, novel drugs with the potential to modulate cellular contractile forces that ameliorate disease symptoms or progression are urgently sought. Nevertheless, there are no pre-clinical, clinical, or industrial methods for quantifying the forces exerted by cells. To bridge this gap, we have created a simple and efficient methodology of contractile quantification which we call Pattern-based Contractile Screening (PaCS). We are commercializing PaCS as a new screening technology that uses cell contractility to identify and characterize novel potential therapeutic compounds while eliminating false positives early in the drug process, thus potentially saving billions of dollars, years of effort, and human lives associated with defective drug candidates. With the William and Rhea Seath Award, we hope to complete the translation of our proven lab method into a successful product.
