HIV test on USB stick could be start of consumer revolution
of bacterial or fungal sepsis. Researchers are also testing ways that the gadget might What if you could meadetect if you’ve become resissure the amount of HIV in tant to certain antibiotics — your blood as easily as you which, if they succeed, would check your weight on the be a major breakthrough in scale in your bathroom or the war against superbugs. take your blood pressure If you’ve followed health using a home cuff ? news over the years, you
That’s the vision of a team probably know there’s a of scientists from the Impetake-home test kit for HIV. rial College London and DNA So how is the USB stick difElectronics, who announced ferent from that? in November that they had The answer is that the kit developed a potentially revmeasures HIV antibodies, olutionary gadget to detect which can tell you whether an HIV patient’s viral load. you’re infected but not sig
The disposable device, nal the amount of virus in which looks very similar to your body — a measure of the USB memory stick that the severity of the disease you use to move files from over time. People who are computer to computer, is HIV-positive monitor their based on a mobile phone viral levels constantly so that chip. It takes a drop of blood they can tell if their medicaand determines the amount tion is working or if it’s time of virus in it. It then creates to move on to something an electrical signal that can else. The goal for most indibe read by your laptop or viduals is to keep the load other device. close to zero, and thanks to
The technology, if pera new generation of drugs, fected, could eventually help those who manage that can identify the presence of all live nearly as long as peosorts of other foreign invadple without HIV. ers in your blood, from hepGraham Cooke, one of atitis virus to the presence the study authors and a cli- nician scientist in Imperial’s Department of Medicine, explained that the stick could help those who are HIV-positive monitor their viral load more regularly. Typically, they now have to go to a doctor or clinic to get blood drawn, then wait while that sample makes its way to a central testing lab and the numbers are reported back.
“At the moment, testing often requires costly and complex equipment that can take a couple of days to produce a result. 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,” Cooke said.
The research, reported i n t he j ournal Sc i enti f i c Re p o r t s , i s i n t h e e a r l y stages, so there’s still a ways to go before the device might be available to consumers.
But the results are very promising: In 991 blood samples, it was able to determine the amount of virus with 95 percent accuracy. And that took, on average, a mere 20.8 minutes.
The idea behind the HIV USB stick — of empowering consumers to access information about themselves that previously had been difficult or even impossible to get — is a seductive notion promoted by several prominent companies. One, 23andMe, aims to help people understand their own DNA. Another, Theranos, promised but couldn’t deliver on quick and cheap pinprick technology that it envisioned would allow people to bypass doctors for lab tests.
Cooke speculated that the stick could be especially beneficial for people in remote locations where getting to a clinic can be difficult.
One of the coolest discoveries about DNA in the past two decades is that it can conduct an electrical current.
This finding has sparked countless projects to explore whether the material could help us create smaller, faster and more energy-efficient circuits that overcome the limitations of silicon-based electronics.