Description
- Abstract:
- At least half of the world’s population lacks access to essential health services and point of care (POC) testing is one solution that can improve access to healthcare in various settings. POC devices developed for use with blood are of utmost importance as blood is commonly used for monitoring of one’s health status and for disease diagnoses. However, blood-based diagnostics developed for the POC face challenges as they rely on cold chain shipping, must remove inhibiting molecules, are highly manual, and require large sample quantities. Nucleic acid extraction from blood, which is required for neonatal screening or HIV diagnosis, faces further challenges as specialized reagents and techniques are required to extract high quality nucleic acids. Thus, this dissertation focuses on reducing the burden of blood-based diagnostic testing at the POC. This dissertation began with a qualitative assessment of barriers and facilitators to obtaining a HIV diagnosis in the Dominican Republic, which provided insights into sample collection and analysis from political, economic, social, and technological points of view. The descriptions of what participants would like to see in a new POC device provided further evidence of the importance of this dissertation work. Microfluidic devices were designed, optimized for use in isolating plasma and purifying human genomic DNA and total RNA from blood. With these devices, the input sample volume was reduced, the amount of reagents used for extraction and purification was decreased, and the protocols were simplified when compared to gold standard methods. The latter half of this dissertation focused on dried blood spots (DBSs), where gDNA extraction from DBSs was first characterized and investigated to work towards a standardized manual protocol for nucleic acid extraction. Most notably, we developed Electro-DBS to extract gDNA from DBSs simply using a buffer and a low voltage power supply. The dissertation concluded with the investigation of application of this device for the more clinically relevant RNA extraction from DBSs. Overall, this dissertation developed methods to reduce the burden of sample extraction from blood for POC use and demonstrated the importance of understanding the context in which a device will be used.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Lee, Kiara R.,
"Leveraging biotransport mechanisms in the design of technologies to improve access to blood-based diagnostics"
(2023).
Biomedical Engineering Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:7uzpfby3/
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Biomedical Engineering Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Biomedical Engineering department....