tuberculosis

New flu detection test can be carried in a first aid kit

After the H1N1 "swine flu" virus jumped from pigs to human in 2009, more than 18,000 people died and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it the first global pandemic in more than 40 years.

Today, biomedical engineers out of Brown University and Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island hope that their prototype flu detector biochip will help contain the next major flu outbreak by enabling the quickest, most accurate, and most affordable diagnosis possible.

The team's assay, which they call SMART (short for A Simple Method for Amplifying RNA Targets), consists of a series … Read more

Tracking diseases using Google Maps and cell phones

Many of us have relied on rapid diagnostic tests at one time or another, whether it's testing for pregnancy, blood glucose levels, or strep throat.

But while dropping fluid samples on a small strip for near-instantaneous results is affordable and convenient, reading results using the human eye means there is the potential for, well, human error.

So researchers at UCLA have taken the human out of the equation as much as possible and developed a digital "universal" reader for all rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs, that requires no translation of results.

In the journal Lab on a … Read more

Portable device to detect pathogens in 30 minutes

Engineers at Cornell are building a handheld pathogen detector that will help health care workers around the world test for pathogens such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and HIV and get results in as little as 30 minutes, instead of waiting days.

Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering, has been using synthetic DNA to amplify tiny samples of pathogen DNA, RNA, or proteins. Because of $25 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge to 12 teams developing point-of-care diagnostics, Luo will be combining forces with Edwin Kan, a Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, who has built a computer chip that can respond quickly to those amplified samples.

The engineers describe their novel device as something akin to a molecular-level Lego builder.… Read more

iPod, Android cancer device offers low-cost testing

A professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University has unveiled a device that, in conjunction with an iPod Touch or Android-based tablet, analyzes microRNAs to detect cancer quickly and affordably.

Syed Hashsham says his Gene-Z device, which he demonstrated this week at the National Institutes of Health's first Cancer Detection and Diagnostics Conference, in Bethesda, Md., could dramatically improve early cancer detection in developing nations that have few, if any, cancer screenings services.

"Until now, little effort has been concentrated on moving cancer detection to global health settings in resource-poor countries," Reza Nassiri, the … Read more