Healthy Future Takes Shape

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It’s basically an accessory to a cell phone. But the new CelloPhone developed by UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute can do something that even the iPhone can’t mimic.

The device can produce a digital hologram of your blood, sweat or urine and send it wirelessly to a remote computer for analysis with the results returned in minutes via text message.

The beauty of it aside from the fact it relies heavily on technology already in standard cell phones is that it could allow people at home or in rural places to get quick test results. In the future, doctors might use it to diagnose malaria and HIV in the bush.

“This will put laboratories into the hands of remote African villagers,” said Aydogan Ozcan, 30, an electrical engineering professor who led the team of medical experts and technicians that invented the device.

The CelloPhone uses off-the-shelf parts to convert a regular cell phone into the ultimate mobile laboratory. It works like this: Tissues or body fluids are put on a slide, which is then inserted into the device and illuminated with blue light. The image, captured by a chip on the cell phone, is transmitted for remote analysis.

It sounds fairly sophisticated, but the CelloPhone uses only cheap parts, and took just two years and about $500,000 to develop helping fulfill the mission of the institute at UCLA to rapidly commercialize devices based on nanotechnology.

The invention recently won a $200,000 unrestricted grant from the Vodafone Americas Foundation, which rewards innovative projects in wireless telecommunications.

“We wanted to put it on the path by pushing it forward to the next stage,” said June Sugiyama, the foundation’s director in Walnut Creek.

The researchers hope they can eventually sell the device for as little as $10 or $20 across the globe, but still probably need to raise a few million more dollars to reach that goal. In the meantime, the research team is setting up a company and devising ways to raise more capital.

“This is no more complex than an existing camera on a cell phone; any phone can be converted,” Ozcan said.

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