Innovative Lab-on-Disk Technology for Rapid and Integrated Analysis of Pathogen Nucleic Acids

Abstract

Conventional nucleic acids (NA) analysis in diagnostics requires centralized laboratories and specialized staffs that are limiting towards the miniaturization and integration typical of “genetic point-of-care” (PoC) technologies. Moreover, all steps for the analysis need to be performed separately using different instruments and procedures far away from the sample-in-answer-out approach. For these reasons, we introduce an easy-to-use PoC technology based on a Lab-on-Disk miniaturized system for pathogen genomes analysis. It is composed by a polycarbonate disk, a silicon chip and a customized reader, integrating electronic and optical modules for the disk driving and the genome detection by Real Time PCR (qPCR). For testing the extraction and detection performances, we used samples of Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) genome.