Grant: Alliance Grants

Despite annual spending of US$ 8.3 trillion/yr-equivalent to 10% of global GDP-health care around the world remains highly inequitable. In particular, there is substantial variation in health care access, quality, and capability between urban centres and rural or remote communities, even in countries with the world's most advanced health care systems. In Canada, for example, rates of arthritis, heart disease, obesity, and high blood pressure are consistently higher for rural Canadians, alongside lower overall life expectancies. Local access to diagnostic medical imaging and clinical laboratory services is common in urban centres, but is not the case for most rural and remote communities, limiting physicians' ability to diagnose and treat their patients. New technologies are thus urgently needed to improve access to healthcare for rural Canadians at the point of need. This proposal aims to develop smartphone-based diagnostic technologies to enable clinical decision-making by rural healthcare professionals in their own communities. Smartphones have many features that make them ideal for point-of-care diagnostics: they are lightweight and portable, they have onboard battery power, optical sensors, and network connectivity, and the public is broadly familiar with their use. Specifically, this proposal aims to develop a lateral flow immunoassay to quantify the levels of heart stress markers in whole blood. Our approach will lower detection limits, remove the need for instrument calibration, and allow for more tolerance for variable imaging conditions without a specialized reader device. This project partners Profs. Zachary Hudson and Russ Algar in the Department of Chemistry at UBC with the British Columbia Rural Health Network and the Rural Coordination Council of BC, two provincial organizations that work with BC's Ministry of Health to advocate for rural Canadians and see new policies and technologies implemented to improve rural health care.