New Cocktail may Help Improve Diagnosis and Treatment

A cocktail of a drop of blood, water, a dose of DNA powder and gold particles could help better diagnose your condition and aid treatment.

The cocktail diagnostic is a homegrown brew being developed by University of Toronto's Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) PhD student Kyryl Zagorovsky and Professor Warren Chan that could change the way infectious diseases, from HPV and HIV to malaria, are diagnosed.

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And it involves the same technology used in over-the-counter pregnancy tests.

Zagorovsky's rapid diagnostic biosensor will allow technicians to test for multiple diseases at one time with one small sample, and with high accuracy and sensitivity.

The biosensor relies upon gold particles in much the same vein as your average pregnancy test. With a pregnancy test, gold particles turn the test window red because the particles are linked with an antigen that detects a certain hormone in the urine of a pregnant woman.

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"Gold is the best medium," explained Chan, "because it's easy to see. It emits a very intense colour."

Currently scientists can target the particular disease they are searching for by linking gold particles with DNA strands: when a sample containing the disease gene (ie. Malaria) is present, it clumps the gold particles, turning the sample blue. Rather than clumping the particles together, Zagorovsky immerses the gold particles in a DNA-based enzyme solution (DNA-zyme) that, when the disease gene is introduced, 'snip' the DNA from the gold particles, turning the sample red.

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"It's like a pair of scissors," Zagorovsky explained, "and the target gene activates the scissors that cut the DNA links holding gold particles together."

The advantage is that far less of the gene needs to be present for the solution to show noticeable colour changes, amplifying detection. A single DNA-zyme can clip up to 600 "links" between the target genes.

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Just a single drop from a biological sample such as saliva or blood can potentially be tested in parallel, so that multiple diseases can be tested for in one sitting.

But the team has also demonstrated that they are able to transform the testing solution into a powder, making it light and far easier to ship than solutions, which degrade over time.

Powder can be stored for years at a time, and offers hope that the technology can be developed into efficient, cheap, over-the-counter tests for diseases such as HIV and malaria for developing countries, where access to portable diagnostics is a necessity.

Their research was published in Angewandte Chemie, a top chemistry journal published out of Germany.

Source-ANI