The 5-Cent Stamp-Sized Test that Will Save Millions
DFA's Paper Chips SOURCE: DFA
A piece of paper the size of a postage stamp could save your life. Thanks to Diagnostics For All (DFA), a non-profit organization that is dedicated to providing “low-cost, easy-to-use, point-of-care diagnostics” to those who live beyond the reach of urban hospitals and medical infrastructures, this technology, which experts are hailing as “game-changing,” will soon be available in even the most remote corners of the globe.
The device, which was developed Harvard University’s George Whitesides Laboratory, is essentially a series of canals printed on tiny chips of paper. Apply a drop of human fluid – blood, saliva, sweat, what have you – on the end and the paper will draw the liquid through the canals, without the need for any electricity or external pump, and into assay agents which provoke a reaction that causes the liquid to change color. Then it’s just a matter of comparing the color change to a reference scale printed on the side of the device. It’s easy to use, easy to transport, cheap, reliable, and accurate.
“Paper is inexpensive, universally available, and compatible with many biological and chemical assays,” the developers explain, which makes it perfect for field testing in the developing world.
As global health initiatives expand their ability to treat infectious and parasitic diseases in resource poor areas, the need for accurate, inexpensive methods to test for liver toxicity, a common complication caused by the aggressive drugs that are used to treat these diseases, is of the utmost importance. Prevention through the use of this diagnostic chip is predicted to save one-quarter of the 13 million HIV or tuberculosis patients currently undergoing treatment worldwide from premature death.
It’s no wonder then that DFA’s elegantly simple fusion of biotechnology and microfluidics found its way into Popular Science’s 100 best innovations of 2011. They’ve basically “created a lab on a chip,” says Popular Science editor-in-chief Mark Jannot. They have eliminated the need for “expensive lab work that uses microscopes and computer chips and that sort of thing – particularly difficult in the developing world,” he continues. What they have created is a system that takes just a few drops of blood and 15 minutes. “And it costs not hundreds of dollars but five cents,” Jannot adds.
This kind of technology has been in the works for several years now and has seen various incarnations.
In 2009, IBM scientists in Zurich debuted a silicon chip designed to diagnose heart disease, but with an eye to becoming a one-stop diagnostic test. The team hoped to one day be able to identify any disease with developed markers such as breast, prostate and lung cancer, HIV, Hepatitis C, Influenza virus, Epstein-Barr virus and even some bacterial infections like E. Coli.
This past February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C., Professor John McDevitt of Rice University spoke on the programmable bio-nano-chips (PBNCs) his department is currently developing for use in hospitals. Of the 5 million emergency room trips Americans make each year complaining of chest pain only about 20% of those are actually heart attacks.
“We have patients clogging the ER system and delaying the recognition of true heart attack cases because we can’t, in an expeditious manner, rule out false alarms that could have been diagnosed in the ambulance or the home setting,” explained Biykem Bozkurt, the Mary and Gordon Cain Chair, Professor of Medicine and director of the Winters Center for Heart Failure Research at Baylor College of Medicine.
But these developments, though potentially life-changing and cost-saving in the first world, are still too bulky and expensive to have the same impact in third world countries.
So for the moment DFA reigns supreme in the field of affordable diagnostics. And now, thanks to a $2.99 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development, they will be extending their technology for agricultural uses to improve productivity and health among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.
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