Scientists from Glasgow University developed a new method for detecting malaria.
Their method involves preparing a folded paper using a printer and a hot plate that has 98 percent sensitivity in detecting infected participants from two Ugandan primary schools.
The World Health Organization reports that malaria caused the death of 435,000 people in 2017. Malaria is widespread in 90 counties with 219 million people affected. The spread of the disease can only be reversed and arrested through diagnosis in infected people who do not show any symptoms. This is limited since the detection of malaria can only be done through PCR (polymerase chain reaction) that can be conducted in laboratories.
The study of the researchers was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their method involved using paper and detecting it through LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) which is better for use in the field.
Materials involved in the method include a printer to coat the paper, a hotplate that melts the patterns in the paper, in order to bond that paper and wax.
A channel in the wax is placed with a patient's blood sample. The paper is folded which guides the blood sample into a narrow channel and distributed to three small chambers which the LAMP machine utilizes in testing the DNA for the presence of Plasmodium falciparum. It takes only less than 50 minutes in determining whether the species that causes malaria is present in the blood of a person.
Lead author Prof Jonathan Cooper of Glasgow University's School of Engineering said: "We tested our approach with volunteers from two primary schools in the Mayuge and Apac districts in Uganda. We took samples from 67 schoolchildren...and ran diagnostic tests in the field using optical microscopy techniques, the gold standard method in these low-resource settings, a commercial rapid diagnostic procedure known as a lateral flow test and our LAMP approach. We also carried out PCR back in Glasgow, on samples collected in the field.
"Our diagnostic approach correctly diagnosed malaria in 98 percent of the infected samples we tested, markedly more sensitive than both the microscopy and lateral flow tests, which delivered 86 percent and 83 percent respectively.
"It's a very encouraging result which suggests that our paper-based LAMP diagnostics could help deliver better, faster, more effective testing for malaria infections in areas which are currently underserved by available diagnostic techniques."
