Luke Lee gets $1.5 million Gates Foundation grant to develop diagnostic chip

Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Luke Lee has been selected to receive a Point-of-Care Diagnostics grant through Grand Challenges in Global Health, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Grand Challenges program seeks to engage creative minds across scientific disciplines - including those who have not traditionally taken part in health research - to work on solutions that could lead to breakthrough advances for those in the developing world. Professor Luke P. Lee will pursue an innovative point-of-care diagnostics project, titled "Integrated Microfluidic Universal Sample preparation (USP) Module for Parallel Diagnostics of Infectious Diseases".

The project goal is to develop a microfluidic Universal Sample Preparation (USP) module that is relevant for parallel diagnostics of infectious diseases. This USP device will require no external reagents, have low power consumption, have no need for off-chip sample manipulations, can be mass produced economically, and can be operated on-site with minimal training.

The grant will provide $1.47 million in research funding over three years.