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 The device, created by scientists at Imperial College London and the
privately-held U.S. firm DNA Electronics, uses a drop of blood to
detect HIV, then creates an electrical signal that can be read by a
computer, laptop or handheld device.
The researchers say the technology, although still in the early
stages, could allow patients to regularly monitor their virus levels
in a similar way to diabetes patients checking their blood sugar
levels.
It could be particularly useful in remote settings to help HIV
patients manage their treatment more effectively, since current
tests to detect virus levels take at least three days and involve
sending a blood sample to a laboratory.
"Monitoring viral load is crucial to the success of HIV treatment.
At the moment, testing often requires costly and complex equipment
that can take a couple of days to produce a result," said Graham
Cooke, who co-led the research from the Imperial's department of
medicine.
"We have taken the job done by this equipment, which is the size of
a large photocopier, and shrunk it down to a USB chip."
The test, which uses a mobile phone chip, requires a drop of blood
to be placed onto a spot on the USB stick. Any HIV in the sample
triggers an acidity change, which the chip transforms into an
electrical signal. This is sent to the USB stick, which shows the
result on a computer or electronic device.
Published in the journal Scientific Reports, results showed the
stick test was 95 percent accurate over 991 blood samples, and the
average time to produce a reading was 20.8 minutes.
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Some 36 million people worldwide are infected with the human
deficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, and the majority of them
live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Current AIDS drugs, called anti-retrovirals, reduce virus levels in
a patients blood to near zero.
But in some cases the drugs stop working - sometimes because virus
has developed resistance to them - and the first sign of that would
be a rise in a patient's so-called "viral load".
Virus levels can't be detected by routine HIV tests, which can only
show whether or not a person has the virus.
(Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
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