Smart engineering toward pen-side diagnosis of sheep scab

Since the introduction of microfluidics technologies, from the early 1990s, for the analysis of extremely small amounts of fluid using interconnected networks of microchannels, there has been an exponential evolution of these methods. In particular, the recent growing interest into microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (µPADs) for human health in low-resource settings has great potential to be exploited for animal disease diagnosis. In this PhD project, sheep scab, the most important ectoparasitic disease of sheep in the UK, has been used as a model disease for developing point-of-care diagnosis of animal diseases. Two enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) for the diagnosis of sheep scab have been successfully translated from their standard lab-based format onto paper (P-ELISA) and a 3D µPADs has also been developed to incorporate the two assays toward pen-side diagnosis of this disease. Results from this project could allow for other lab-based ELISAs to be transferred onto P-ELISA and for the 3D µPAD platform developed to enable pen-side diagnosis of this and other animal diseases.