The early detection and isolation of viruses are critical especially when facing an outbreak of an infectious disease like Zika, influenza, or Ebola. A new Penn State www.psu.edu startup is working to tackle this challenge by developing a new portable technology.
As a viral outbreak begins to spread, people with recent infections may not yet show symptoms and unknowingly spread the disease. Also, the concentration of viruses in early field samples can be quite low so that virus identification is expensive, slow, or dependent on large-scale medical equipment.
To meet the challenges, a team of interdisciplinary Penn State researchers in physics, chemistry, materials science, and biomedical engineering have developed a promising portable technology that could increase the identification of new viruses from field samples.
“This devices allows researchers to selectively trap and concentrate viruses by their size”, notes Mauricio Terrones, Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Sciences in the Penn State Eberly College of Science http://science.psu.edu. “It enables researchers to be able to detect small amounts of a virus by more than 600 times.”
The new startup Virolock Technologies LLC, led by Terrones and other Penn State biomedical researchers was recently awarded $75,000 from the “Fund for Innovation” to jumpstart the growth of the startup.
The company expects to manufacture custom-made cartridges to target specific viruses as they believe that the technology will expedite vaccine development because their technology does not require existing antibodies which is unlike other technologies.
After receiving grant funding from the “Fund for Innovation”, a program within the “Invent Penn State Initiative” and the Eberly College of Science, the team consulted with the Penn State Office of Technology Management www.research.psu.edu/otm for advice on how to patent and license the intellectual property.
The startup plans to use their $75,000 jumpstart funding to set up new lab space to continue to refine the manufacturing process for their disposable cartridges. The USDA has already validated their product for the diagnosis of plum pox, and the company hopes that future research may validate additional viruses, including avian influenza.