Recent changes in healthcare and an increasing role of technology in society have spurred demand for highly sensitive point-of-care diagnostics for both medical professionals in the clinic and consumers in home-testing applications. Despite extensive research and development during the last few decades, many point-of-care testing methods such as the lateral flow assay (LFA) still suffer from poor sensitivity. Photoluminescent reporters such as fluorescent nanoparticles can be incorporated into LFAs and other point-of-care testing formats to improve sensitivity, but with the tradeoff of requiring readout instrumentation and optical hardware that is often too cumbersome, expensive, and impractical for many end users. Persistent luminescence, also called long-lifetime phosphorescence, is a phenomenon wherein an inorganic material emits visible luminescence for minutes to hours after photoexcitation. We hypothesized that nanophosphors derived from such materials could be used as highly sensitive reporters in assays when analyzed via a simple time-resolved photoluminescence detection strategy which eliminates the need for the expensive optical hardware essential for sensitive fluorescence readout. In previous work we demonstrated that nanophosphors could be applied in LFAs to achieve better analytical sensitivity than gold nanoparticles [1]. Expanding on this work, we have developed a smartphone-based point-of-care testing platform that enables highly sensitive and quantitative photoluminescence imaging of nanophosphor LFA strips by using a phone's camera and flash with a simple, inexpensive phone attachment. This smartphone-based readout strategy could be readily adapted to work with numerous other point-of-care testing formats and can potentially work with a broad variety persistent phosphors.<br/><br/>[1] Andrew S. Paterson et al., Analytical Chemistry, 86(19), 9481-9488, 2014.

Highly sensitive smartphone-based point-of-care diagnostics enabled by persistent luminescence nanoparticles

251st National Meeting (2016)

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