A team from Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ), in partnership with Hackensack University Medical Center, one of the region's top-ranked medical centers, is working to refine a new way to more quickly and accurately detect dangerous infections.

The new detection technology is based on gel-tethered DNA and RNA detection probes, an advance co-invented by materials science Professor and Associate Dean Matt Libera, former Stevens Ph.D. student David Dai and Dr. Salvatore Marras at the Public Health Research Institute in Newark, New Jersey.

Dr. Libera and his team have measured detection events in spans of time as short as 20 to 30 minutes, which is dramatically shorter than the current method that can take anywhere from one to three days to identify an infection. The new microgel probes, Our probes perform better than the traditional method of using microarrays on a glass slide because they are manufactured and patterned in arrays using electron beams and share some of the properties of both liquids and solids.