EAST LANSING, Mich. — A researcher at Michigan State University is well on his way to making a commercially viable device that can detect diseases in plants as well as in people, and pathogens in food, at a low cost.

The device is handheld and has been named the Gene-Z. Its inventor, MSU professor of environmental engineering Syed Hashsham, is working right now on getting a patent for the device. “We’re close to having a commercially ready unit, but we’re not there yet. The university owns everything I do here. I do get the first right of refusal on that,” he said, referring to the possibility of licensing the Gene-Z.

The device can analyze body material from a person and detect a disease such as cancer. It can do the same thing with material from a plant or a piece of food. He said it can do it with a sample of water, too. “It’s really a very low-cost gene analyzer,” Hashsham said.

Low-cost is the key. The Gene-Z is made for use in the field, where it is “less cumbersome than a central lab.” Hashsham said the device has been proven to detect downy mildew in cucumbers. Brad Day, an associate professor of plant pathology at MSU, is helping to validate the device for that particular application.

“This is a really unique device,” Day said. “Downy mildew is a huge problem for the cucumber industry in Michigan.”

He said his team has validated that the device works at “a DNA level. Can we validate it from whole plant tissue? How easy is it to detect disease? We want it to be simple and easy.

“People in the pickle industry are clamoring for this. They’re spending $5 (million) to $6 million to control downy mildew in the state. We don’t want to just sit on this. We want to put this research into action in the field,” Day said.

He also said there’s a question of how specific the device should be in detecting disease. For example, he explained there are probably detectable differences in downy mildew as it occurs in cucumbers as opposed to melons. He said there’s a kind of balancing that goes on between the desire for more specificity and the need for simplicity and ease of use.

Hashsham said the device has to be validated for a particular application using several hundred samples and reviewed by an independent expert to prove it works. If the application is a human disease diagnostic, then it will be regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). If it isn’t regulated, it still has to be proven to work, to an independent expert in the field.

“There is a very strict process of quality control,” Hashsham said.

He added the potential market for human applications is large, but the regulatory requirements are much more rigorous than they are for applications that do not require FDA clearance.

“These have to be much more carefully proven,” he said. “The other thing is finding the money. We will have something that can be used in a year, but that’s not money in the bank. It depends on continued funding.”

If such an invention is potentially so beneficial and inexpensive, why wasn’t it invented before now? Hashsham said it’s all about money. He explained he’s doing this partly for altruistic reasons, but he also believes there is a market for the device and that it can be commercially viable.

“Partly I believe there is an economic benefit, but for a large company there might not be a benefit,” he said. “Why should they develop a device that costs $500 when they can market a machine that costs $100,000?”

He described agricultural applications for the Gene-Z as a “small but important niche. They are going to do more testing in plants.”

Hashsham developed the Gene-Z with help from a grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corp., which was shared with MSU researcher Jim Tiedje and University of Michigan researcher Erdogan Gulari. He also received help developing the device from MSU students Robert Stedtfeld, Farhan Ahmad, Dieter Tourlousse and Greg Seyrig. Maggie Kronlein, another MSU student, helped develop the cancer marker approach for the device.