MICROFLUIDIC DIGITAL FOCUS ASSAY FOR THE QUANTIFICATION OF INFECTIOUS INFLUENZA VIRUS

This paper reports a digital focus assay (dFA) that addresses several limitations of conventional assays for quantifying infectious influenza virus.The preliminary results using this platform were reported at TAS 2023 (poster) and AIChE Annual Meeting 2023 1 .This work builds on that through the i) Use of an aqueous maintenance media (MM) in addition to a viscous, microcrystalline cellulose (MCC)-based overlay medium, which simplified the device operation ii) Automation of the image analysis using a custom Python code iii) Verification of the dFA viral titers by comparing against a plaque assay performed in parallel iv) Demonstration of running clinical samples on the dFA platform with comparisons to the corresponding dPCR titers.