Team:ZJUT-China/Implementation
We thought thoroughly about how to implement our project in the real world. By expending the application of the project with freeze-drying and simplifing the results analysis with a simple device for, the 'easy-to-use' to 'ready-to-use' was achieved.
We found that the diagnosis of many diseases is closely related to RNA biomarkers, so we would like to make our contribution in RNA detection. Our project aims to detect RNA using Cell-Free system that converts molecular signals into fluorescent signals. As a biosensor, our project is fast, cost-effective, safe and convenient. When designing the project, we not only evaluated the scientific validity of the test method, but also took into account the user experience, in line with the trend of testing technology from invasive to non-invasive.
This is a flow chart of how our products travel from the lab to the proposed end user.
This is the cartoon we drew to attract potential users and make them understand the product better.
We hope that our project will provide supporting evidence for the diagnosis of some diseases through the detection of RNA biomarkers. Also, we hope to provide new ideas for RNA detection technology.
By freeze-drying, we were able to freeze complex reagents in EP tubes with a volume of only 1.5 mL, which greatly reduced shipping costs. Since the reagent is in solid form, it also reduces the terrain requirements for shipping. In this way, the shipping range of our RNA biosensor is dramatically expanded and can be shipped to remote areas.
Freeze-drying also simplifies the operation, as only a few drops of water are needed to activate the reaction in the EP tube. In use, only the body fluid sample needs to be processed in advance, and after the purified RNA is obtained, it can be added to the Cell-Free system for reaction. Considering the lack of instruments to analyze the fluorescence data in areas where medical resources are scarce, we hope to achieve a rough preliminary judgment of the examination results with just a cell phone or the naked eye. So we designed a device equipped with a certain wavelength of excitation light and a filter, and the test results can be easily observed by simply putting the EP tube into the device.
We are not familiar with the operation of lyophilization, and the shelf life of our biosensor has not been further explored to ensure its detection effectiveness under long-term storage conditions. We consider orthogonal experiments on air humidity and preservation time in subsequent experiments to give more detailed protocols for use.
We did not incorporate the step of extracting purified RNA from body fluids into our project, which is clearly missing consideration. We still need to refine our sample processing section. As for the minimum detection limit, although our device can resolve fluorescence intensities at lower concentrations, the sensitivity of our biosensor still needs to be further explored.
The population distribution of our research is distinctly geographical, mostly concentrated in the southeast coastal region of mainland China. Not enough data is collected from remote and medically under-resourced areas, which leaves our product with great potential for improvement.