Holger Schmidt & Team Has Designed COVID Detection on a Chip

UCSC KRAW Lectures has focused on UCSC’s groundbreaking COVID-19 efforts, further demonstrating UCSC’s leadership in genomics and disease detection. COVID tests can be as fast as 60-seconds, but the accuracy tends to decrease with expediency. And most tests focus on only one type of material: RNA, antigens or antibodies. What if there was a fast way to detect all three?

Healthcare professionals need to be able to get diagnoses quickly, rather than sending samples offsite to be processed and waiting for the results. Professor Holger Schmidt’s team and lab is developing technology that could give doctors compact instruments that can deliver test results quickly and onsite. This optofluidic technology, invented in his lab, uses small silicon chips to guide light to either optically excite individual molecules or collect them for electrical detection with a nanopore. This allows physicians to assess if an infection is present, and how strong it is. These “labs-on-a-chip” detect viral RNA, antigens or antibodies, and count the molecules one by one, creating great promise for rapid, low-cost, and accurate testing for coronaviruses and other diseases. This is another example of the advances and promise of the research on integrated devices and nanopores taking place at UC Santa Cruz.

About Holger Schmidt

Holger Schmidt is the Narinder Singh Kapany Chair of Optoelectronics and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz. He also serves as Associate Dean for Research for the Baskin School of Engineering and director of the W.M. Keck Center for Nanoscale Optofluidics. His research interests include single molecule detection and analysis in optofluidic devices, hollow-core waveguide photonics, atomic spectroscopy on a chip, nano-magneto-optics, and spintronics. Schmidt's awards include NSF Career Award (2002), Keck Futures Nanotechnology Award (2005), and the Engineering Achievement Award from the IEEE Photonics Society (2017). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (2014), IEEE (2019), and the National Academy of Inventors (2019).