Alexandra Patterson, Ph.D. Candidate
2025 Suddath Award Winner
Mark Styczynski, Advisor
ABSTRACT
Although the United Nations has defined universal access to medical care as a primary goal, the inaccessibility of a critical healthcare tool—diagnostics—has significantly impeded global medical access. While conventional point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms are effective for detecting simple biomarkers, such as those used in diagnosing pregnancy or COVID-19, they often fall short in complex diagnoses due to sensitivity, specificity, quantification, and multiplexing requirements. In recent years, cell-free expression systems (CFS) have emerged as a promising strategy to overcome these limitations. CFS—in vitro gene expression powered by cellular lysates—harness the protein expression functions of a cell without the constraints of living systems, enabling effective use of nature’s evolved specific, sensitive, and diverse sensing machinery. I have pursued two approaches to enable use of CFS for complex POC disease diagnostics by 1) expanding diagnostic capabilities of CFS at the POC and 2) decreasing development time for novel CFS diagnostics. The first approach couples lateral flow assays and CFS for 10-plexed sensitive detection in at-home settings. Through optimization, we achieved a greater than 20-fold reduction in sensitivity compared to traditional multiplexed reporters, and have worked with manufacturers to design and build prototypes in a user-centric way. The second approach entails increasing the predictability of CFS when expressing multiple proteins—a requirement of most CFS diagnostics. Via a series of detailed investigations, we have characterized, modeled, and implemented solutions to enhance the reliability and predictability of these systems, in turn decreasing their development time. These efforts have the potential to enable rapid development of globally impactful next-generation diagnostics by increasing the translational utility and capabilities of CFS.
The F. L. "Bud" Suddath and Frances "Lee" Gafford Suddath Fellowship Award was established by family and friends in recognition of Bud Suddath's contributions as a Georgia Tech faculty member and to support Bud and Lee's shared interest in graduate education in the fields of biology, biochemistry and biomedical engineering. The fellowship award is given annually to Georgia Tech Ph.D. students, typically within one year of graduation, who have demonstrated significant achievement in research of fundamental importance in the fields of biology, biochemistry, or biomedical engineering and are working in laboratories affiliated with Georgia Tech's Institute of Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB).