Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This proposal is addressing challenges that Canada will face in the next few decades. As seen recently on the international scene, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, such as SARS, avian flu, and pathogens, such as West Nile virus, HCV and others might threaten population. This problem is magnified due to the increasing fraction of elderly individuals in the population. To address these issues, Canada will need advanced biomedical technologies for early detection of infectious diseases in humans and also in animals. Current blood tests can require days and even weeks to confirm a diagnosis of the presence of a pathogen and other infectious diseases in a patient. The development of affordable diagnostic technologies, such as Point-of-Care Testing (POTC) devices, in the form of hand-held, finger-prick blood sampling devices will provide for more timely and accurate test results. POTC is extremely interesting since it can be performed at the site of the patient care, such as in emergency rooms, battlefields, outpatient clinics, nursing homes, patients' homes or hospital bedside, with the result leading to possible change in the care of the patient. The proposed research fully corresponds to this vision and aims to develop nano- and microtechnologies that will target a much shorter diagnosis time combined with an exceptional limit of detection. To this purpose we plan to develop novel ultra-sensitive tunable photonic crystals (PhCs) that will be used at specific optical resonances to detect bio-labeled quantum dots (QDs). It is envisioned that the sensitivity enhancement will be such that the time consuming DNA extraction and PCR amplification steps usually needed prior to the analysis might be eliminated. This would of course lead to a drastic reduction of the analysis time. In addition, in contrast to conventional fluorophores, QDs that have extremely narrow emission spectra, will allow to move beyond single parameter biochemical paradigms towards routine multianalyte detection schemes.