Multifunctional microfluidic patch for infectious diseases diagnosis

In vitro diagnostic (IVD) technologies have revolutionized healthcare globally, giving actionable information on various health parameters such as drug concentrations and (infectious) disease biomarkers. The importance of decentralized diagnosis and immediate follow up (e.g. isolation, treatment) sadly became clear worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is going to become even more important as globalization, climate change and population aging will exponentially increase the impact of (tropical and neglected) infectious diseases to non-endemic countries, including Europe. However, as also witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, IVD has not yet succeeded fulfilling highly demanding needs for diagnostics at the point-of-care (POC) since current solutions still largely fail in essential aspects, like desired sensitivity and specificity, portability, versatility, accuracy, ease-of-use and compatibility with mass-manufacturing. Therefore, there is an urgent need for fully integrated, cost-effective platforms that could enable not only the deployment of lab-quality bioassays at the POC but ideally also integration with sampling acquisition and as such offer the true sample-to-result solution.


FORTIFIEDx objective: To tackle this technological gap, the FORTIFIEDx interdisciplinary consortium will, (1) explore novel multifunctional biocompatible polymers and (2) establish high-throughput manufacturing approaches to (3) develop a disposable and self-powered microfluidic-based IVD POC test (i.e. FORTIFIEDx patch) capable of (i) biofluids (self)sampling via hollow microneedles (HMN) and (ii) immediate analysis of this sample on the very same patch, for 2 medical applications, (selected among many in need for such ground-breaking solution): sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and viral haemorrhagic fever (VHF).

To succeed in this, the FORTIFIEDx consortium will cover the entire value chain, working in the fields of material science, engineering and microfabrication, microfluidic technology development, bioassay development, clinical validation and life cycle assessment (LCA), thereby involving all critical expertise from 2 universities (KUL and MUL), 5 research institutes (JR, PCCL, TYN, ITM and CNFRSR) and 2 SMEs (TEM and ZDS).