On Centre College Week: Improving health care access can improve healthcare outcomes, but how do we do it?
Daniel Scott, associate professor of chemistry, examines a path forward.
Daniel Scott joined the Centre College faculty as an assistant professor of chemistry in 2017. Prior to joining Centre, he was an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at DePauw University. Daniel completed his graduate work in bioanalytical chemistry in the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky and was a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky as part of the NIH funded Cancer Nanotechnology Training Center. His research interests include the development and optimization of simple and accurate point-of-care diagnostic devices working at the interface of nanotechnology, biochemistry, and engineering. Daniel’s work has been funded by the NIH, NSF, and the Society for Analytical Chemist of Pittsburgh.
Novel Point-of-Care Diagnostics
Underrepresented minorities and socioeconomically-challenged communities carry a disproportionate burden from both communicable and noncommunicable diseases, which drain financial resources and decrease life expectancy for millions of people in the United States and across the globe.
The discrepancy in the impact of disease is due in part to the lack of early diagnosis and pathology services, which are critical for early detection, diagnosis, and disease management. Point-of-care diagnostic systems increase access to diagnosis by providing opportunities for at-home or on-site testing and shorten the time from analysis to diagnosis, thereby improving care and treatment decisions. Current point-of-care systems, such as the rapid COVID or flu test, offer the advantages of portability and quick results compared to traditional laboratory-based analysis but still suffer from several issues, including limited options for biomarkers of certain diseases, complicated protocols that may be difficult for untrained personnel to complete, and limited ability to quantitate the results.
Our group is working to fill some of these gaps in the point-of-care diagnostics world by novelly combining engineered nanoparticles with a microfluidic lateral-flow platform. The nanoparticles are designed to respond selectively to a specific biomarker and generate a signal that will be read on the lateral-flow platform. Once the signal has been generated, qualitative results will be visually read by the user without the need for additional instrumentation or, if desired, quantitative results can be generated with the aid of a smart phone and camera or a custom-built instrument we have also developed. To date, we have demonstrated capabilities for nucleic acids such as tuberculosis disease DNA, small molecules such as cortisol, or larger proteins such as the inflammation marker c-reactive protein. In the future we will look to continue to expand the biomarkers and diseases we can detect and further increase access to affordable diagnostics.
