Point-of-need molecular processing of biosamples using portable instrumentation to reduce turnaround time

Abstract

Infectious agents, both standard and emerging or engineered, might initiate outbreaks with global impact and/or existential- level threat potential. Such agents might infect human, livestock, exploitable plant cultures or the environment at large. Instead of responding by sampling teams which may also carry out prolonged surveillance, a more effective concept is to pre-process the samples, possibly to nucleic acid extract so as to transport them without biological risks by standard channels, or to process them up to a point and return the results, leaving the samples which only need specialized tests and dedicated equipment. In this context a portable device, allowing multiple routine and crisis -management applications due to its inherent flexibility, is scrutinized against alternatives and possible needs so as to develop a novel standard of surveillance and intervention, meant to facilitate containment by providing faster much more reliable laboratory results at a fraction of older generation mobile nucleic acids analyzers. Additional steps, such as agarose in pills and buffers pre-packaged in expendable syringes with pistons locked by improvised safety features may improve the Complexity Level of the whole system so as to make it appealing to intervention/crisis management personnel, while the instrument proper may double as backup for respective benchtop devices.

Keywords

• Point-of-Need
• Biosurveillance
• Public health
• Biosecurity – biosafety
• Portable PCR
• Portable NGS