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18h ago

UC Berkeley Engineers Introduce Coffee-Ring At-Home Test for Rapid Ultra-Sensitive Disease Detection

A paper in Nature Communications describes how a 3D-printed at-home kit harnesses coffee-ring evaporation, plasmonic nanoparticles, AI-powered imaging to detect disease markers in under 12 minutes with up to 100-fold greater sensitivity.

Using coffee-ring effect, scientists boosted sensitivity of diagnostic tests by pre-concentrating disease biomarkers into a ring pattern.

Overview

  • The prototype test kit uses a 3D-printed scaffold, a syringe for sample placement and a small electric heater to guide evaporation and form a diagnostic coffee-ring pattern.
  • Plasmonic nanoparticles bind to disease biomarkers concentrated at the droplet’s rim and generate optical signals analyzed by an AI-powered smartphone app.
  • In under 12 minutes the device can deliver results with up to 100× greater sensitivity for COVID-19 compared to conventional at-home tests.
  • Researchers have demonstrated detection of biomarkers for sepsis and are exploring its use for prostate cancer screening in low-resource and clinical settings.
  • The findings, supported by seed funding from the CITRIS and Banatao Institute, are detailed in Nature Communications as researchers prepare for clinical validation and broader deployment.