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Low-Cost HIV Diagnostic Tool for Remote Areas Requires No Electricity

Diagnosing HIV and other infectious diseases presents unique challenges in remote locations that lack electric power, refrigeration, and appropriately trained health care staff. To address these issues, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed a low-cost, electricity-free device capable of detecting the DNA of infectious pathogens, including HIV-1. The work was performed by a team at the Seattle-based international non-profit PATH, led by Paul LaBarre, senior technical officer. The device uses a small scale chemical reaction, rather than electric power, to provide the heat needed to amplify and detect the DNA or RNA of pathogens present in blood samples obtained from potentially infected individuals. The core technology the researchers developed and continue to improve is a system known as NINA, for non-instrumental nucleic acid amplification. A critical feature of the nucleic acid test is the ability to detect infection at very early stages.

Topics:
Diagnostics Measuring Instruments Medical Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:18 Point of technologies are important in our particular area of interest which is low resource settings because many times people will come with symptoms of a disease, travel many miles, kilometers down a road often, down a path, unpaved roads Perhaps carrying their children, missing a day of work to get a diagnostic & treatment Point of technologies are very important because without them, that sample that's taken that day may have to travel days to go to a laboratory for results That person goes back to their village with their child and perhaps is never seen again for treatment once those results come in So our objective with some of the technologies we're working on is to really bring that much closer so the diagnosis and treatment

    00:01:05 happen at the point-of-care so that those people can go back to their communities treated and get back on with their lives quickly We've been working on a platform called NINA stands for non-instrumented nucleic acid amplification and the whole reason for this technology come into being because a lot of the worst diseases that plague say Sub-Saharan Africa, for example HIV and malaria are two really good examples occur superimposed with a map of the least electricity available, density. There's just not a lot of electricity available in these these areas and so the traditional means of high accuracy

    00:01:48 diagnostics just aren't available to the majority of people in some of the areas that were most concerned about that PATH. The core technology is called chemical temperature control. What's happening with our NINA core technology is that we're using a chemical reaction to exothermically create heat. We create a nice stable temperature profile for the chemical reaction by thermally coupling that with what's called an engineered phase-change material and as long as we have two phases, we can achieve isothermal temperatures What happens in the process of a person coming into a clinic is they give a very small sample through a finger prick so 50-100 microliters of blood

    00:02:31 will go into a test tube that has what we call the master mix of all the reagents necessary to amplify RNA and DNA. That requires heat, so that master mix will then go into our chemical heater for 30 to 60 minutes and and then the results are another technology that requires electricity-free detection We're pairing the NINA technology with some of the most innovative detection technologies that are out there.