Project Leader:       
Andre Marziali

Lead Institutions:       
University of British Columbia, Boreal Genomics

Research Funding Program:
SOF 2

The research team will develop new detection systems for identification of infectious agents directly from biological samples easily & quickly allowing point of care diagnostics with an easy to use and portable device.

Nucleic acid diagnostics hold tremendous promise for clinical application – an area that remains largely unfulfilled by the complexity, cost, and unreliability of PCR based detection methods in clinical samples such as blood. For example, DNA from tumour cells has long been suggested as a marker for early cancer detection, yet the challenge of detecting a few partially degraded nucleic acids in a background of healthy tissue DNA and other contaminants from blood, limit utility of this diagnostic. Similar barriers are present for pathogen and mRNA detection for disease diagnostics.

The UBC Applied Biophysics Laboratory (ABL) has developed a novel and highly successful technology for nucleic acid extraction from difficult samples, named SCODA. This technology has shown itself to be 100-1000 fold better than standard methods at rejecting contaminants in environmental samples, and has been licensed into Boreal Genomics, a UBC spin-off company.

Recently, the UBC lab has demonstrated the ability to make SCODA's DNA extraction from difficult samples selective for specific sequences, and has demonstrated single-nucleotide specificity in this selectivity. This opens the door for the development of an integrated device capable of extracting and detecting specific rare sequences from clinical samples, allowing point-of-care diagnostics with an inexpensive, easy to use and portable device.

In collaboration with Boreal, researchers will develop an imaging system coupled with sequence-specific SCODA to demonstrate extraction, enrichment and detection of rare DNA from a blood sample with near single-molecule sensitivity. While this level of detection would rival PCR, even less sensitive detection would make the device useful in applications that require a quick readout, including pathogen RNA detection and others.