SUNY Poly Professors Partner with R&D Firm to Create Technology for Advanced Lyme Disease Testing

SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) today announced Empire Innovation Professor of Nanobioscience Dr. Nate Cady and Connecticut-based research partner Ciencia, Inc., have laid the groundwork to begin exploring a more sensitive detection platform to more efficiently diagnose Lyme Disease using a test developed at SUNY Poly.

Using Ciencia’s grating-coupled enhanced fluorescence platform, Dr. Cady’s team was able to diagnosis Lyme disease in under an hour with their test by using mere droplets of blood. This is a significant improvement over existing Lyme disease diagnostics, and the team foresees this technology being applied to a variety of other clinical problems, such as the detection of autoimmune diseases or infection, including COVID-19. Ongoing collaborations between Ciencia and Dr. Cady have explored several such applications with favorable results.

“We are very excited about our ongoing work with Ciencia on Lyme disease testing, and the potential to use this approach to diagnose other diseases,” Dr. Cady said. “This work emphasizes SUNY Poly’s unique ability to combine nanoscale engineering capabilities with the biological sciences to generate new technologies.”

​”Lyme disease testing is historically inaccurate and challenging to interpret correctly,” Pilar said. “Dr. Cady’s preliminary results for Lyme disease diagnosis are very promising, and we have recently submitted a National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposal to continue this exciting research.”

In April, SUNY Poly announced Dr. Cady and Dr. Scott Tenenbaum were awarded funding to collaborate with Ciencia to develop a more complex novel coronavirus (COVID-19) diagnostic test that can provide additional data points to arm medical workers with the information they need to potentially improve patient care. For more information about this research, please visit: https://sunypoly.edu/news/news-release-suny-poly-professors-conducting-collaborative-research-leading-covid-19-test-also.html.