Now, a 10-min strip test for Ebola, dengue

New Delhi: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a simple paper strip device similar to a pregnancy test capable of diagnosing Ebola and viral hemorrhagic fevers such as yellow fever and dengue fever, described in a paper that appears in the journal Lab on a chip. “As we saw with the recent Ebola outbreak, sometimes people have symptoms and it’s not clear what they have,” said Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, a visiting scientist in MIT’s department of mechanical engineering and a member of the technical staff at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

 “We wanted to come up with a rapid diagnostic that could differentiate between different diseases,” Hamad-Schifferli added in a statement. Ebola diagnostic kits used in West Africa send patient blood samples to a lab that can perform advanced techniques such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which can detect genetic material from the Ebola virus. The whole process takes around two hours, while the paper test can diagnose the viral in 10 minutes. 

“For many hemorrhagic fever viruses, like West Nile and dengue and Ebola, and a lot of other ones in developing countries, like Argentine hemorrhagic fever and the Hantavirus diseases, there are just no rapid diagnostics at all,” said Lee Gehrke, a professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), in a press release by MIT. The MIT strips are colour-coded in a way that they can differentiate between several diseases. Researchers used triangular silver nanoparticles that can take on different colours. They used red, orange, and green nanoparticles and linked them to antibodies that recognize Ebola, dengue fever, and yellow fever. 

When the patient’s blood serum is dropped on the strip, any viral proteins that match the antibodies painted on the stripes will get caught, and those nanoparticles will become visible. “When we run a patient sample through the strip, if you see an orange band you know they have yellow fever, if it shows up as a red band you know they have Ebola, and if it shows up green then we know that they have dengue,” Hamad-Schifferli explained. The researchers are expecting to get the approval of Food and Drug Administration to begin using the device in areas where the Ebola outbreak is still ongoing.