Postdoctoral Researcher Pillar 3 - Emerging & Communicable Infectious Disease Diagnostics
RAPID Institute Dublin City University
Deadline:
30 May 2025
£45,847 to £50,968 IUA Postdoctoral Researcher
Salary Scale (Point 1 – Point 5) – €45,847 - €50,968
Applications are invited from suitably qualified candidates to join the RAPID Institute (Research Advances in Personalised Integrated Diagnostics) Research Group in DCU. The goal of our Institute is to understand and exploit the role of epigenetics in diseases that are particularly governed by temporal changes in the epigenome (e.g. Neurodegenerative & Metabolomic diseases/disorders).
The RAPID Institute works across 3 distinct technology pillars/platforms (e.g. benchtop, portable and wearable diagnostic devices) to delve into the emerging power of epigenomics, explore biochemical wearable sensors, and enable POC settings with rapid, affordable testing. These platforms will be interconnected in a way that impacts epilepsy, substance abuse and infectious disease in unprecedented ways.
The proposed Postdoctoral research role will fall within research as part of Pillar 3 - Emerging & Communicable Infectious Disease Diagnostics. PILLAR-3 will focus on the evolution of a more powerful and flexible technological counterpart to traditional LFI (i.e., centrifugal orthogonal flow immunoassay) for POC testing of the communicable diseases of interest.
The appointed Postdoctoral candidate will be hosted in the School of Biotechnology, Dublin City University, working under the direction of the Principal Investigator within the Institute's interdisciplinary research team. Given the analytical power conferred by process integration, it is interesting that microfluidics has had so little impact on POC testing.
The lateral flow immunoassay (LFI) test for pregnancy may be the single most commercially successful microfluidic POC test ever (followed by recent surge in antigen tests for SARS-CoV-2). However, outside of these examples, microfluidics has not contributed extensively to testing where it could have the most impact – emerging pathogens where infectious disease management and suppression is required, and where testing infrastructure is not available.
A clear desire exists for bacterial infection results during the patient's visit to eliminate the guesswork of empirical medicine. In particular, Neisseria gonorrhea (GC) and Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) are the most commonly reported STIs in Europe. Yet, few portable, low-cost POC tests for such bacterial infections have surfaced. What is needed is a flexible platform that can shift the burden from hospital labs to the GP setting.
We will develop a platform with two completely different disc-based tests for communicable diseases that interface with a single instrument. The first is an antigen-based immunoassay test rooted on research/IP from Prof. Landers' work on the centrifugal Orthogonal Flow Immunoassay (cOFI), a more robust alternative to LFI. The second relies on amplification of bacteria-specific sequences in a Nucleic Acid Amplification Test (NAAT) developed on an elaborate disc architecture at DCU in collaboration with our manufacturing partner (Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology).
The proposed Postdoctoral research role will build on core technologies developed by both Prof. Landers and other members of our interdisciplinary research team and will lead (i) development of a disc-based Centrifugal Orthogonal Flow Immunoassay (cOFI) technology platform and (ii) development of a novel wireless electronics, co-rotating centrifugal disc platform. The team will create disc-based POC devices with two distinct approaches – one involves immunoassay for urine analysis, the other Nucleic Acid Amplification Testing (NAAT) of swabs.
Both the immunoassay and NAAT will focus on POC technology for bacterial infection associated with the communicable diseases GC and CT. For the first, we will leverage the Orthogonal Flow Immunoassay (cOFI) we have developed for infectious agent detection on polyethylene terephthalate discs. This disc-based system is a more robust alternative to LFI for urinalysis and can multiplex analysis (multiple pathogens) with simple colorimetric or smartphone detection.
The second will exploit DCU's dissolvable valves for complex, automated sample preparation that has previously been applied to blood processing and NAAT to process swabs. Both systems will be compatible with the same portable laboratory instrument which will be built on co-rotating wireless electronics platform.
#J-18808-Ljbffr