BioFET: A New Generation of Preeclampsia Diagnostic Point-of-Care Kits for Personal Use

Offer Erez with Gil Shalev of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, in collaboration with Diomede Ntasumbumuyange of the University of Rwanda in Rwanda, will develop an affordable point-of-care diagnostic platform for prediction and detection of women at risk for preeclampsia early in pregnancy. The sensor system is an electronic biochip composed of biological field-effect transistors (bio-FETs) incorporating antibodies to sFlt1 and PIGF, two key preeclampsia biomarker proteins. It will be designed for simultaneous (multiplex) monitoring of blood and urine levels of these two biomarkers, accommodating whole blood and not requiring pre-measurement processing of the sample or the sensor, making it suitable for out-of-hospital use. They will evaluate the system with an existing inexpensive read-out device, testing it with samples of whole blood and urine spiked with the biomarker proteins, as well as samples collected from pregnant women in Israel and in Rwanda, and compare these clinical sample test results to those using a conventional FDA approved ELISA.