“We are interested in making something that can detect disease rapidly and can be operated by an end user, or someone who is not medically trained or a technician,” Hamad-Schifferli said.
The device uses a sample of a body fluid, such as blood, serum, or saliva, to test a patient, Gehrke said. The test operates by diverting the sample in a maze-like structure and making it run into chemicals, said José Gómez-Márquez, director of the Little Devices Lab at MIT and senior collaborator on this research.
According to MIT postdoctoral fellow Justina Tam, who is working on visual markers, or detection agents, for the rapid diagnostic, “the detection agents are agents that have some visible color if they accumulate in a certain area of the test, which means a protein for a specific virus is present in the sample.”
Not only does this visible color indicate whether a patient is infected with a virus, but it also reveals the virus’s specific strain.
REAL-TIME RESULTS
According to Gómez-Márquez, aggregating the results of the rapid diagnostic through an accompanying phone app allows researchers to track the spread of viruses in real-time, which he hopes will prevent their spread in the future.
He called the device a crowdsource diagnostic because it relies on many users to send images of their results via the phone app. The diagnostic itself gives a result, but the phone app quantifies it and measures the location of the infectious diseases so that the spread of viruses can be tracked rapidly, Gómez-Márquez said.
“If we can do that for hundreds of patients, then we can get a real-time map of the spread of the disease,” he added.
He said that up to now, maps of the spread of viruses include information of what occurred in the past, based on death records and hospital records that are weeks old. The new technology gives health providers a better understanding of the path viruses could take in the future.
“In public health, we don’t have real-time maps for epidemiology, but that’s important for saving the next lives.The prevailing attitude is looking at the past, which doesn’t allow us to help the future,” he said.
According to Gómez-Márquez, several people are working on the phone app for different platforms, including the Android phone.
According to JN Fang ’16, who is working on an Android version of the app, health workers administering the diagnostic will be able to use the app to read and aggregate the results of the test. The app can determine “if...the change in test strips is enough of a change to indicate that the patient has tested positive for either of the four strains of dengue fever or Ebola,” she said.
After testing the diagnostic in the laboratory, Gehrke said his lab is currently field-testing the device. According to Gehrke, the commercial launch of the device will depend on the regulatory process for approval by the FDA.
This rapid diagnostic will be another tool among “a number of different methods [that] are going to be necessary for detecting and hopefully stopping this virus and other infectious viruses,” Gehrke said.
—Staff writer Jasmine Hakimian can be reached at jasmine.hakimian@thecrimson.com.