Label-Free Sickle Cell Disease Diagnosis using a Low-Cost, Handheld Platform

Recent technological advancements have made strides in shifting clinical diagnostics from large centralized laboratories to the point of care, thus widely increasing the accessibility to such diagnostic procedures worldwide. For sickle cell disease diagnostics, many current technologies require costly equipment and specialized training while others rely on subjective interpretation of results and can be vulnerable to user error. In contrast, the self-contained, user-friendly, and low-cost platform proposed here uses magnetic focusing to separate, image, and analyze blood cells based on their densities. Here, the applicability of this approach is demonstrated to provide a quantitative diagnosis of sickle cell disease. Further, in low-resource settings such as sub-Saharan Africa (where the disease is common but no ubiquitous testing and monitoring procedures are in place), this technology can enable simple, rapid, and accessible sickle cell disease diagnostics and monitoring.