Developing Diagnostics for the Developing World - John Cooper's presentation at Photonics West 2012

spie.org From the MOEMS/MEMS plenary session at SPIE Photonics West 2012 Abstract: Infectious diseases cause 10 million deaths each year worldwide, accounting for ~60% of all deaths of children aged 5-14. Although these deaths arise primarily through pneumonia, TB, malaria and HIV, there are also the so called "neglected diseases" such as sleeping sickness and bilharzia, which have a devastating impact on rural communities, in sub-Sahara Africa. Here, the demands for a successful Developing World diagnostic are particularly rigorous, requiring low cost instrumentation with low power consumption (there is often no fixed power infrastructure). In many cases, the levels of infection within individuals are also sufficiently low that instruments must show extraordinary sensitivity, with measurements being made in blood or saliva. In this talk, a description of these demands will be given, together with a review of some of the solutions that have been developed, which include using acoustics, optics and electrotechnologies, and their combinations to manipulate the fluid samples. In one example, we show how to find a single trypanosome, as the causative agent of sleeping sickness. Biography: Jonathan Cooper has pioneered technologies in biosensors (1980s), protein and DNA microarrays (1990s) and Lab-on-a-Chip and Bionanotechnology (2000s). He has published ca. 200 research papers, and is the founder of Mode Diagnostics (www.modedx.com), producing home diagnostics for bowel ...
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