EMD Millipore Donates $50,000 to MIT for Platform to Detect Ebola

EMD Millipore announced on Aug. 12, 2015 that it intends to donate $50,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the development of a diagnostic and tracking platform for the Ebola virus. The rapid test is expected to take less than 10 minutes and is predicted to cost less than $3.00 US dollars per test.

The contribution will primarily support the work of Lee Gehrke, PhD, who is the Hermann von Helmholtz Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at M.I.T. and is also a professor of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. The platform detects the presence of the Ebola virus via multicolored silver nanoparticles attached to antibodies; each colored band represents a distinct infection-associated protein. The bands are delivered to the cell phones of health care workers and are monitored over time to track the spread of disease. The funds from EMD Millipore will allow Professor Gehrke to tweak the platform to detect numerous strains of the disease, including Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, and Marburg.

Source: EMD Millipore