Engineers at Cornell are building a handheld pathogen detector
that will help health care workers around the world test for
pathogens such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and HIV and get
results in as little as 30 minutes, instead of waiting days. Dan
Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering, has
been using synthetic DNA to amplify tiny samples of pathogen
DNA, RNA, or proteins. Because of $25 million in funding from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge to 12
teams developing point-of-care diagnostics, Luo will be
combining forces with Edwin Kan, a Cornell professor of
electrical and computer engineering, who has built a computer
chip that can respond quickly to those amplified samples. The
engineers describe their novel device as something akin to a
molecular-level Lego builder. Because single strands of DNA pair
up with others that have complementary genetic codes, the
engineers can synthesize strands that will match others--even
matching over only specific parts of their leng