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University of Melbourne Dr Andrew Buultjens, Research Officer in the Stinear Laboratory at the Doherty Institute

Can you introduce yourself and your role at the Doherty Institute?

I’m a Research Officer in the Stinear Laboratory at the Doherty Institute. I first began working with Professor Tim Stinear and the lab in my undergraduate honour’s degree, staying on throughout my PhD and Postdoc. Originally, my focus was split between molecular biology and genomic analysis. As my PhD progressed, however, I evolved towards becoming a dry lab informatics scientist. More recently, due to the pandemic, I’ve pivoted to developing instruments that carry out diagnostic testing.

What initially attracted you to this area of science?

I’ve always been interested in the environment, nature, and microbiology - how microbes rule the world. In my PhD, I developed a strong interest in bioinformatics, which is using high-power computing resources to understand genetic information. Most of that work was focused on investigating how some bacteria evolve to become pathogens and developing innovative ways to trace outbreaks. Through this work, I developed skills in data analytics - particularly machine learning. In this innovative space within biology, many techniques are borrowed from the study of artificial intelligence in order to draw deeper insights from biological data, genomic or otherwise.

As you mentioned, you pivoted this year due to COVID-19. What was the original focus of your work when you started your current role, and what are you doing now?

Originally, my work was focused on using machine learning techniques to examine the origins of outbreaks and find genomic loci associated with traits of interest, like alcohol tolerance or pathogenicity. When the pandemic came along, however, things changed. Professor Tim Stinear, the head of our laboratory, is always looking for innovative ways to provide deliverable point of care diagnostics. He knew that I had an interest in electronics, so he asked me whether I might be able to create a very cheap device that could detect a positive reaction in the SARS-CoV-2 tests that we were conducting. That sounded simple enough at the time, so I began to work on it. It actually turned out to be a huge challenge! We've now developed something that’s quite robust, however, and has the potential to be quite helpful with fighting the pandemic.

Can you tell us about the technology you’ve created?

What I’ve made is a portable isothermal amplification platform that reads fluorescence from reactions and reports results to a centralised database in the cloud, named the FABL-8. It’s been created using readily available parts and there has been a strong focus on keeping the manufacturing process as simple as possible. The big innovation here is that it’s ultra-low cost. We found our system was equal in performance to commercial devices, which cost around US$5000. In comparison, the FABL-8 costs around US$300 per machine.

The FABL-8 has not been developed in isolation and is part of an all-inclusive COVID-19 diagnostic platform that the team and I have been working on. Other major arms of this project have been repurposing 3D printers as high-performance RNA extraction robots, led by Dr Koen Vandelannoote, and the expression and purification of key enzymes required to run the molecular detection assay, led by Dr Liam Sharkey. Collectively, we’ve developed a high performance and cost-effective end-to-end solution for scaled and decentralised COVID-19 testing.

How might this be useful in the pandemic to support diagnostics?

What we’ve developed creates an opportunity for scaled and decentralised deployment of COVID-19 testing efforts, with low cost instrumentation that is simple to manufacture from readily available parts. In addition to the exorbitant cost of commercial instruments needed to run isothermal molecular detection, is the fact that they are sourced from overseas and there's quite a considerable amount of time before instruments can be obtained due to global demand. Our system is unique in that it is a complete package that can be generated locally.

How did you go about creating the FABL-8?

I've had an interest in electronics since I was a little kid. I have created a lot of things in my own time as a hobbyist but making this was quite a different challenge because of the level of precision required. Initially, I tried to make something with what I had in my parts collection at home to see if detecting a positive reaction was even possible using non-specialist equipment. I used cheap LEDs and a very useful semiconductor device - called a photodiode - that could read light intensity, as well as an old soldering iron as a heat source. I essentially performed a melt curve on the reactions and was able to discern between positive and negative reactions from a shift in fluorescence that was picked up by the LED and photodiode combination. From this very crude experiment, we could see that there was the potential to carry out a measurement using commonly available parts. This was very important. From there, we built complexity into the system that allowed us to achieve greater sensitivity and specificity.

What does a typical workday look like at the moment?

What we’re developing is a complete system, so at the moment, it really varies. Some days it's pure electrical engineering on my desk where I'm making a new prototype using tools and working with hardware. Other days, it's writing the code that's orchestrating the system. There's moving parts - there's heat, there's optics, there's networking. There are all these different factors going on. I'm constantly tweaking the prototype for greater performance and reliability. Now, I’m also finding myself writing grants. That's quite a new thing for me. It's really exciting to be involved in all aspects of this project.

Science and technology are moving at lightning speed, and much of the work that you do now would not have been possible when you were originally studying science at university. Do you have any advice for someone who might be interested in pursuing science technology as a career?

I would suggest researching and reading articles on the innovative technologies that are available. I remember at the start of my Honours degree that I was really interested in long read sequencing, which was quite an experimental technology at the time. Throughout my PhD and my postdoc, however, that technology became established and is used routinely in research labs today. It's been very fascinating to watch it develop. So, I’d recommend looking ahead with your career. As your experience as a scientist progresses, you’ll see which of those almost wacky methods in research papers end up entering the lab and your work in the future.

The FABL-8 is a semi-finalist in XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing, a 6-month competition that aims to increase COVID-19 testing capabilities 100-times past the current standard. Dr Buultjens’ has also been shortlisted for the Dean’s Innovation Grant, a scheme that awards two researchers up to $50,000 to support compelling projects that have the potential to achieve significant societal impact and/or economic benefit.