Infectious Diseases Diagnosed At Point-of-Care

A new “lab-on-a-disc” technology can diagnose malaria and other febrile infectious diseases simultaneously in just an hour, allowing faster point-of-care treatment and precise drugs administration that could save thousands of lives.

A major problem with current testing for infectious diseases in Africa is that it focuses on individual diseases and cannot reliably discriminate between them. Since most infectious diseases have the same feverish symptoms, diagnosis is often inaccurate, resulting in thousands of deaths and increased resistance to antimicrobial drugs.

A team of scientists at Freiburg University (Germany) have developed a new diagnostic tool: an easily-portable lab-on-a-disc, which can test for several tropical diseases at the same time, discriminate between them and guide healthcare personnel to proper patient treatment. A health professional injects the patient's blood sample onto a plastic disc, the “LabDisk,” which is roughly the size of a compact disc (CD), and then places the disc in the 'disc player'. The device weighs just 2 kg, making it perfect for transportation to remote villages. The disc has pre-stored biochemical components, which allow fully automated analysis.

The blood sample is processed on disc and centrifugally distributed into microfluidic chambers where the disease pathogens can be identified from their DNA/RNA, whether it be from parasites like malaria, bacteria such as typhoid or pneumonia or for example dengue viruses. This generic point-of-care platform can be applied to many other infectious diseases for example Ebola, only by changing its bio-components. Early diagnosis can help limit the effects of an extended epidemic.

Konstantinos Mitsakakis, PhD, who led the team that developed the platform, said, “It is a very simple and cheap system that can be used in regions with low medical infrastructure. Results can be obtained from a finger prick of blood in just one hour, whereas laboratory culture currently takes up to three days. This could mean very important progress, not just for patient management, but also for epidemiological mapping of regions and countries, as we will be able to monitor the frequency and distribution of various infectious diseases.”

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Freiburg University