The development of drug-resistant HIV variants is an important cause of virologic failure. In order to choose effective regimens, assays for diagnosing resistance are essential. Pol gene mutations within the HIV retrovirus, which are associated with drug failure and phenotypic resistance, can be used as the assay targets. Current diagnostic assays include various genotypic and phenotypic assays, recombinant virus assays and other commercial assays. However, these assays are time consuming. To address this issue, we are applying engineering principles to convert the oligonucleotide ligation assay (OLA), developed by Frenkel et al., for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, to significantly reduce the timeframe for diagnosing drug resistance, leading to regimen decisions. In order to detect the HIV pol gene using OLA, nucleic acid (NA) from bodily fluids need to be extracted and purified. Current extraction methods are time consuming, and require complex procedures, instrumentation, and expensive reagents unavailable in low-resource settings. We are developing novel approaches to capture NA without instrumentation through the use of stimuli-responsive polymers. These polymers are capable of responding to specific changes in their environments, such as temperature variations, resulting in a change of their physical properties; our polymer becomes cationic and aggregating. Magnetic nanoparticles (mNPs) can be utilized in conjunction with these polymers for biomolecule separation by applying a stimulus and a magnetic field. The new NA extraction strategy starts from complexing cationic stimuli-responsive polymers with NA, and then magnetically separating NA from solution via the co-aggregation with mNPs and heating (characterized using standard agarose gel protocol). This extraction method utilizes 2 reagents and takes about 20 minutes, which will reduce cost and enable POC diagnostics in low-resource settings. The extracted NA can then be amplified, tested for the presence of the mutant pol gene, and used to better diagnose HIV drug-resistance and determine patient regimens.