Ultrasonic device diagnoses disease in 30min

The automated device, developed by Dr Julien Reboud, a Research Fellow at Glasgow University’s Division of Biomedical Engineering, can make a diagnosis with a small sample - such a finger prick of blood - and can be used by anyone without any specialist training.

On July 17, 2013, Reboud was joint winner of The Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Foundation Entrepreneurs Award for young business-minded researchers in electro-technology.

The device - dubbed Saw Dx - requires a low-cost, disposable microchip containing a sample to be placed into its reader, which would propagate ultrasonic waves across the chip.

The ultrasound agitates the sample it in a very specific way, depending what function is needed, such as temperature cycling of the sample or opening cells to release their DNA.

In doing so it removes the processing required in larger, laboratory-based diagnostic machines that can have a footprint of up to 1m². Such machines process a large number of samples simultaneously but take a number of hours to return results. Similarly, finding the DNA of a pathogen also requires a number of steps to identify, amplify, and detect the anomaly.