Malaria card for easy diagnosis

Using what may be called the astronaut-food approach, scientists at the University of Washington have created a credit card-sized tool to test the disease. The novel tool is so small that it can be easily slipped into a wallet, and can work even when taken out months later. The prototype developed by Paul Yager, UW bioengineering professor, dehydrated the reagents to store them without refrigeration, and delivered a diagnosis in just nine minutes.

The cards are a critical step in a long-term project funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative to develop affordable, diagnostic tools for the developing world. The malaria cards contain reagents that would normally require refrigeration, but the researchers stabilised them in dry form by mixing them with sugar.

The long-term project is aimed at developing a system with which a clinician can spot a drop of a patient’s blood onto a card, and feed it into an instrument that gives a yes/no answer for a panel of infectious diseases in 20 minutes or less.