UCSC professor designs fast, cheap Ebola test

Assistant electrical engineering professor-Ahmet Ali Yanik has developed a model with a built-in sensor that can detect Ebola from a small sample of blood and do it faster than tests currently available.

The project has picked up after Yanik began working with UCSC’s chemistry and biochemistry professor Jin Zhang. Yanik started the Ebola test concept back in 2010 but had a hard time finding a team to help patent and develop it.

Yanik says Ebola wasn’t really a crisis back in 2010. Now, with this year’s Ebola outbreak, he says there’s a real need for this technology.

The test starts with a simple blood draw. Once the blood is drawn the device takes about 30 minutes to reveal the results.

“When you have a large influx of potential carriers it’s very difficult to really figure out which one you have to spend 10 hours or maybe a few days depending on the type of tests you are doing. So we wanted to make it short. We wanted to make it simple, and cheap,” says Yanik.

There’s no actual Ebola virus in the UCSC lab. The material used for the research allows them to test the concept.

If a patient tested positive for Ebola a little red box would show up on Yanik’s device, and a black box for a negative result.

Yanik says, “my belief is that it will take another year of research and the allotment will follow that and I don’t know how long that will take because that all depends on the amount of funding because the more hands we have we can do that faster.”

This new technology developed right here on the central coast could one day give doctors quicker answers in the fight against Ebola.