Alcohol use and abuse have wide ranging effects on the public health. The use of biomarkers associated with alcohol-associated disorders in research and clinical practice has been limited by the cost of the assays, the difficulty of the assay technique, the accessibility of the biological source material, and the need to process, store, and ship samples. In this proposal, BioMedomics will apply its proprietary technologies in lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA), novel nanoparticles and time-resolved luminescent detection to technological development of a simple, low cost and onsite multiplexed biomarker testing device and kits for alcohol-associated disorders. The proposed device is a unified multiplex LFIA device capable of collecting samples from personnel in a noninvasive manner, performing all necessary sample processing, and providing results for specific biomarkers within 10 minutes. Because the signal and background can be separated in the time domain, the time-resolved biomarker detection provides significant sensitivity improvement. These proprietary technologies are well beyond the state of the art currently in practice, and are expected to increase test sensitivity by orders of magnitude as well as provide needed specificity and quantitation not available in today's tests. The proposed testing development will find very broad applications ranging from drug abuse testing, clinical diagnostics, drug discovery and development, biodefense, and veterinary diagnostics, to food and environmental monitoring.
