Microfluidic platform for pathogen load monitoring

This paper reports on a microfluidic diagnostic platform prototype to be used for pathogen load monitoring which is compact and can be operated by primary care personnel. The platform combines magnetic separation and optical detection in order to rapidly determine the presence of magnetically labelled pathogens and provide additional clinical information (the pathogen load) in a simple, quick and compact manner without flow. One of the methods used to monitor and initiate treatment of several diseases (e.g. HIV or Influenza) is a pathogen (e.g. viral) count of patients. Knowing the number of pathogens per unit volume of blood is essential in order to determine the initiation and dosage of therapeutic medication and thus increase the survival rate. Preliminary measurements to determine the size of magnetic nanoparticles were performed using dark field microscopy and particle tracking.