Brian T. Cunningham

What they work on

1. Fabricate assemblies of metal nanoparticles and nanodiamonds, diamond particles with light-emitting atomic defects, and couple them to photonic crystals that amplify both excitation and emission for single-molecule counting.
2. Tune nanodiamond emission color through doping strategies that create specific quantum defects, so that several different target molecules can be distinguished at once by their color.
3. Build imaging instruments that operate in both digital-counting and spectroscopic modes, enabling single-molecule measurements with an inexpensive light microscope rather than laboratory equipment.
4. Design and synthesize quantum dot tags with engineered multispectral brightness and tunable photonic-crystal enhancement, aiming to distinguish up to 45 distinct labels in one blood droplet.
5. Test a scheme in which each target biomarker generates multiple downstream quantum-dot detection events, pushing detection limits lower in single-step, room-temperature, enzyme-free assays.
6. Develop a microfluidic cartridge that extracts nucleic acids from 100 microliters of whole blood and uses virus-specific CRISPR/Cas activation to release gold nanoparticle reporters for HIV, HBV and HCV.
7. Validate the crumpled-graphene impedance biosensor and handheld reader on clinical whole-blood specimens from hospital collaborators, benchmarking detection limits against spiked samples.
8. Conduct human factors engineering and acceptability research with behavioral scientists and a scientific advisory group so the triple viral load test matches the needs of clinicians, health workers and end users.
9. Apply the Activate, Cleave, Capture, and Count assay to six cancer mutations including KRAS in calibration standards and banked human plasma, using photonic crystal biosensor microscopy to count released gold nanoparticles.
10. Compare the sensitivity, selectivity and repeatability of digital-resolution circulating tumor DNA counting against droplet digital PCR, the current laboratory standard.

More about the research

Why it matters

Sensitive molecular testing today usually requires central labs, which delays treatment decisions and excludes people without easy access to hospitals. These projects could yield inexpensive handheld tests that monitor HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C viral loads from a drop of blood in community settings, and point-of-care liquid biopsies that help oncologists pick targeted therapies or watch for cancer recurrence during an office visit. The same photonic tools could support broader health, food and water monitoring.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Closest labs

The school

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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