Elizabeth “Clarke” Wilkirson, a fourth-year doctoral student in mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice University, won first place in the poster contest at the Bioengineering for Global Health Conference hosted by Nature Conferences.
Her presentation was titled “Lateral flow-based skin patch for blood-free testing of tetanus vaccination status.” The conference was held Nov. 13-15 at Vanderbilt University.
“Immunity to infections can be determined by measuring levels of antibody in blood, but such sampling can be painful, poses risks of infection and requires trained medical personnel,” she said.
To overcome these limitations, Wilkirson developed a disposable skin patch for the detection of antibody levels in dermal interstitial fluid (ISF), the biofluid that surrounds cells and tissues. It contains numerous biomolecules, though its potential in medical diagnostics has been underutilized because of the difficulty in obtaining sufficient fluid for diagnostic assays.
“Our skin patch uses a microneedle-assisted sampling technique along with a patch that includes a lateral flow immunoassay. We created the patch to detect anti-tetanus toxoid antibodies, which reveal the patient’s tetanus vaccination status,” she said.
Preliminary results from human volunteers detected the presence of antibodies, suggesting the device can serve as a rapid point-of-care test, especially in low-resource settings.
Wilkirson’s partners in the research were Danika Li, a junior in bioengineering at Rice, and Peter Lillehoj, Shankle Chair and associate professor of MECH. She earned her B.S. in MECH from the University of Alabama in 2020.