Towards a Smartphone-Connected Diagnostic Test to Support Vaccination and Disease Prevention Strategies for Children in Low and Middle Income Countri

Supervisors- Rachel McKendry (London Centre for Nanotechnology and Director of i-sense IRC) and David Goldblatt (Institute of Child Health and Director of World Health Organisation Pneumococcal Serology Reference Laboratory)
Overview of Research
The aim of this PhD studentship is to engineer a smartphone-connected point-of-care immunity test for population-level sero-epidemiology for children in low and middle income countries. The research lies at the cutting interfaces of nanotechnology, telecommunications, immunobiology, vaccines and infectious diseases and will involve a collaboration between the i-sense IRC at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the Institute of Child Health and the World Health Organisation Pneumococcal Serology Reference Laboratory, with end users in the Gambia to tackle the biggest killer of children under the age of 5 worldwide- pneumococcal infections.
The key areas of my research will include- (i) the development of optimised surface chemistries & multiplexed analysis of serological biomarkers on paper microfluidics, (ii) the development of a smartphone app to measure immunogenicity in the field with thresholds for immune protection, (iii) benchmarking of the tests to WHO gold-standard ELISAs, culminating in a small pilot study with end users in low and middle income countries.