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This reminds me of https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19343140

I am totally unqualified to judge this current topic [except for a degree in Biology], but I'm just curious if the "foldiscope" was successful or not.




I know Caltech did/does use it in their undergraduate core(?), and even has Dr. Prakash speak w/ the students. That said, I'm pretty sure field application of the device hasn't really panned out and runs into resolution problems. I'm honestly not sure if that was the intention, but checking a few literature review articles and recent pubs doesn't seem to show any major success stories, and mostly notes about resolution.

My favorite invention from his lab is the Paperfuge[^1], though the device is probably too recent to know how useful it'll be. Considering that so much point-of-care diagnostics can be done with either a cheap lateral-flow kit or some Cepheid or Abbot microfluidic product though, a non-integrated centrifuge might be a bit tougher to justify.

[^1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-016-0009, the first author now leads his own lab at GaTech: https://bhamla.gatech.edu/people


It’s a fun project but the microscope is not the bottleneck in any place where you can do a research experiment.




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