Point-of-Care Diagnostics for Disease Surveillance in the Developing World

The burden of infectious diseases is very high in developing countries. World-wide, nearly 1 million die annually from malaria, 2.9 million from enteric (intestinal) infections, 4.3 million from respiratory infections, and 5 million from AIDS and tuberculosis. Unfortunately, most methods for diagnosing these diseases are invasive, labor intensive, and sometimes inadequate. Furthermore, they require laboratory equipment and infrastructure that are not typically found in remote/resource-limited areas. Thus, there is a clear need for point-of-care (POC) technologies that can diagnose and monitor disease in developing countries. In this multidisciplinary collaborative research, we will develop a hand-held POC device that diagnoses and monitors disease with high sensitivity and specificity and without the need for sample preparation. The POC device will be automated and packaged in a self-contained unit, thus obviating the need for trained personnel. Beyond diagnosis and monitoring, our POC device will be poised for conducting surveillance of a disease, which is critical to the management of outbreaks and disease elimination.