Fletchers Cellscope

Project

CellScope is a project led by Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineering professor at UC Berkeley, to turn an ordinary camera phone into a diagnostic microscope capable of detecting diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis in remote, low-resource settings. The idea grew out of a challenge Fletcher set his Optics and Microscopy students: imagine working in a remote African village during a disease outbreak with nothing but a camera phone and a way to magnify a blood or sputum sample, then design a way to capture and transmit a usable diagnostic image, aiming to bring laboratory-grade diagnosis to places with no access to a conventional microscope or trained technician.