10076382Rapid Plasmonic PCR Device and Platform for Single Step Disease Detection and Treatment To Enable Infectious Disease Symptom To Treatment In MinutesClosedGrant for R&DInnovate UK1.4+ billion people are diagnosed with infectious diseases every year. 8 days is the average delay for a person to go from the first symptom to treatment, due to increasing GP wait times, costly gold standard testing with long turnaround times and unreliable point of care tests which suffer from low sensitivity and specificity and cannot accurately guide treatment, such as prescription of the right anti-biotic for a multi-drug resistant bugs. This delay leads to severe disease, causing 15 million+ avoidable deaths every year. We are working on an infectious disease detection technology that can reduce the time patients symptom to treatment cycle to under 30 minutes. For this, we first developed the underlying science for all optical rapid polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based microbial detection from unprocessed sample and have recently 3D printed and tested a base prototype to perform one of the first laser based quantitative plasmonic PCRs on an unprocessed human samples in under 5 minutes.Our prototype uses small but powerful optics and nanoparticles, to amplify and detect pathogen DNA in real time (q-PCR), to provide a <5 minute sample-to-result time. More importantly, it is able to integrate or remove the need for crucial steps (such as cell lysis, extraction and purification) to detect pathogens from unprocessed samples, enabling it to be used without the need for a healthcare professional or a technician. We are able to create an ultralightweight and portable device that is lighter than a laptop and can be used and transported anywhere. By using our fast, single step, portable and high accuracy PCR, first in point of care settings and subsequently in point-of-need or patient-facing settings, we can enable diagnosis and treatment for patients up to 200x faster (from 8 days to under 30 mins) than the existing pipelines and save hundreds of millions of patients from long term health complications and preventing millions of deaths.