Project description
Biosensing platform for rapid diagnosis of Ebola virus
The Ebola virus is highly deadly, with up to 90 % of cases being fatal. Therefore, quickly identifying potential Ebola outbreaks at the point of care is crucial for providing physicians with a more precise overview of the patient's condition before confirmed laboratory results are available. The EU-funded EPoCA project aims to develop a portable biosensing platform for the rapid and remote diagnosis of Ebola infection. This platform will use graphene-based sensor technology to detect specific biomarkers in blood samples, allowing for the identification of the virus and assessment of infection severity. It will also feature cloud networking with AI capabilities to transmit diagnostic results to a central server and send health warnings to interconnected platforms.
Objective
This project proposes developing, preclinical and clinical validation of a Point of Care (PoC) biosensing platform based on multiplexed field-effect sensor technology based on graphene monolayers functionalized with specific and oriented recognizing biomolecules (BioGFET). This technology will be used for the rapid and remote diagnosis of Ebola infection by titrating specific biomarkers in peripheral blood samples. To strengthen the diagnostic ability and offer a robust differential triage of patients, serological biomarkers specific for the virus and biomarkers specific for infection severity will be analyzed and compared simultaneously (Figure). Therefore, the final correlation between the achieved parameters will offer a robust and rapid triage of patients, thus, permitting to identify rapidly at the point-of-care potential Ebola outbreaks and offering to physicians a more precise overview of the patient status before knowing the confirming laboratory results. Besides the proposed technology, another key point of this device is represented by its IA-based cloud networking. In fact, once processed and retrieved, the locally achieved diagnostic results will be transmitted to a central server (for example, located in a General Hospital), processed by a custom-made IA software, and, in case of necessity, a health warning will be sent to all the interconnected platforms, independently to their location.
Fields of science
Not validated
Not validated
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materialstwo-dimensional nanostructuresgraphene
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyvirology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomolecules
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA virusesebola
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.2.1 - Health Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-JU-RIA - HORIZON JU Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
30562 Ceuti
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.