Device opens DNA testing to masses

When Sebastian Kraves was growing up in Argentina, his grandmother gave him something transformative: "The Voyage of the Beagle," Charles Darwin's account of his voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where he made observations that led to his theory of evolution.

"I was blown away by the diversity of life on Earth and how it's all encoded by DNA," Kraves said. "But in high school, when I said I wanted to become a DNA scientist, people laughed and told me to go study something useful."

So he did. After earning his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, he teamed up with Ezequiel Alvarez Saavedra, a former classmate from Argentina who obtained his Ph.D. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they founded Amplyus, a MassChallenge finalist that aims to make DNA technology accessible not only to scientists, but to the masses.

Alvarez Saavedra was the lead developer of their miniPCR — or polymerase chain reaction — machine, which searches for a very specific part of the genome and then makes copies of it. At 2 inches by 5 inches, it's about one-tenth the size of a traditional PCR machine and, at $799, about one-fifth to one-tenth the cost.

Clinicians in a hospital lab can use the miniPCR to test patients for increased risk of certain diseases. Health authorities can use the machine to test food for the presence of E. coli or salmonella. And students can use it to do "CSI-like" forensic testing in the classroom.

"One of those 'got-to-know' procedures is the use of PCR," said Alia Qatarneh, the research assistant at Harvard University's Life Sciences Outreach Program, which works with high school students from across New England. "Students get what PCR is in theory but rarely have the opportunity to run a PCR reaction themselves from start to finish."

"Zeke and Sebastian's miniPCR machine allows for many things," Qatarneh said. "It's incredibly affordable, allows for students to have direct, hands-on experience and takes away part of the mysterious 'black-box effect' that tends to overshadow the science of PCR."

At CampBio, the summer outreach program of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, the Amplyus team led two workshops for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, who role-played Centers for Disease Control scientists examining a claim of tainted beef. The students used the machines to determine which batches were positive for E. coli.

"Exposure to these types of hands-on experiences at such an impressionable age can spark a lifelong interest in science," said Amy Tremblay, the institute's public programs officer. "Through the interactive and cutting-edge workshop the Amplyus team was able to incorporate into CampBio, we may have done just that."

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