Quartz On-chip for Virus Detection: QOVID

Programme(s): HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) MAIN PROGRAMME

Topic(s): ERC-2022-POC2 - ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS2

Call for proposal: ERC-2022-POC2

Funding Scheme: HORIZON-AG-LS - HORIZON Lump Sum Grant

Grant agreement ID: 101082079

Objective:
The global-scale pandemic crisis of COVID-19 requires precise and immediate technological solutions for virological and serological diagnosis tests. These tests must be accurate, rapid, intelligent, and cost-efficient to prevent future rebounds of infections and help control the pandemic. In this context, the Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) industry, especially piezoelectric resonators of all shapes and sizes, is a promising strategy to revolutionize the biological detection market. Ultrahigh sensitive nanomechanical resonators showed the potential of this technology for mass loading. Unfortunately, applying MEMS to the biomedical sector requires challenging qualities, making it often unattainable to material scientists and engineers. QOVID offers a solution to fill this gap between MEMS and biomedicine by developing a commercialization solution for piezoelectric α-quartz resonating devices to detect the mass response of SARS-CoV-2 spike molecular interactions as an original readout of viral loads. QOVID builds on the technology developed during the ERC Starting Grant SENSiSOFT to provide a user-friendly versatile Bio-MEMS sensor prototype that will give researchers in the life sciences and biomedical sector without an engineering or electronic training a reliable diagnostic tool to detect SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses. QOVID will scale up a new generation of On-chip epitaxial piezoelectric α-quartz/Si MEMS manufactured exclusively by soft-chemistry with CMOS-compatible processes offering cost-efficient single-chip solutions not only for biomedical applications but also for many other fields. These α-quartz bioMEMS will have thicknesses between 200 nm and 1 µm, this is between 10 to 50 times thinner and 10 to 100 times more sensitive than those obtained by traditional top-down technologies on bulk crystals. QOVID will pursue commercialization and market solutions both within academia and the biotechnology and biomedical among other sectors.