Washington: Scientists have come up with a quick test for Ebola that can diagnose the deadly disease within 10 minutes.
The new test from MIT researchers involves a device, a simple paper strip similar to a pregnancy test, which can rapidly diagnose Ebola, as well as other viral hemorrhagic fevers such as yellow fever and dengue fever.
The new device relies on lateral flow technology, which is used in pregnancy tests and has recently been exploited for diagnosing strep throat and other bacterial infections.
Until now, however, no one has applied a multiplexing approach using multicoloured nanoparticles to simultaneously screen for multiple pathogens.
Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor, along with Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, the senior author of a paper, said that many hemorrhagic fever viruses like West Nile, dengue and Ebola had no rapid diagnostics at all.
Unlike most existing paper diagnostics, which test for only one disease, the new MIT strips are colour-coded so they can be used to distinguish among several diseases.
The researchers created red, orange, and green nanoparticles and linked them to antibodies that recognise Ebola, dengue fever, and yellow fever. As patient's blood serum flows along the strip, any viral proteins that match the antibodies painted on the stripes will get caught, and those nanoparticles will become visible.
This can be seen by the naked eye; for those who are colour-blind. Even a cellphone camera could be used to distinguish the colours.
This type of device could also be customized to detect other viral hemorrhagic fevers or other infectious diseases, by linking the silver nanoparticles to different antibodies.
The study is published in the journal Lab on a Chip.
