News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel

News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
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Synthetic Biologists Demonstrate Ability to Rapidly Create Cheap, Accurate In Vitro Diagnostics Tests That Could Eventually Help Pathologists Diagnose Disease

Wyss Institute develops prototype Ebola test in less than 12 hours with $20 in materials, perhaps paving the way for inexpensive paper-based diagnostic tests with a wide range of applications outside the medical laboratory

One goal of many synthetic biology researchers is to create in vitro diagnostic testing systems that produce results that are as accurate as those produced in today’s state-of-the-art clinical laboratories, yet are much cheaper to run because they incorporate low-cost materials, such as paper.

Recently, two teams of researchers worked to demonstrate how several synthetic biology methods, when combined with programmable paper-based diagnostic platform, could detect antibiotic-resistant bacteria and strain-specific Ebola virus. These findings were published in a peer-reviewed medical journal last fall.

Such cell-free circuits embedded in paper could be the breakthrough in synthetic biology that leads to pocketsize blotter tests that can detect such diseases as Ebola in the field.  Should this line of research be applied to clinical settings, pathologists and medical laboratory scientists could soon be processing bandages that change colors in the presence of certain bacteria, or examining paper-based clothing infused with diagnostic laboratory tests that react to bio-markers specific to a chronic disease patient’s condition. (more…)

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