Acute respiratory infections are the third leading cause of death worldwide, and account for 4.2 million deaths annually;more than 40% are children under five. Conventional techniques are often either too slow (e.g., conventional cultures require 5 to 10 days) or too insensitive (e.g., one study found the sensitivity of a laterl flow immunoassay test for flu to be as low as 10.4%). Despite their insensitivity, the lateral flow test market for infectious disease grew over 40% in 2009. Because of its sensitivity and specificity, molecular testing are beginning to supplant conventional culture as the gold standard. However, limitations with current molecular tests for identifying multiple respiratory pathogens from a single sample include: high complexity operation, lack of sensitivity, lack of respiratory pathogen coverage, and/or lack of sequence coverage for a given pathogen. Thus, we propose to address these limitations with an automated sample-to-answer point-of- care molecular device that identifies hypervariable genomes across the following panel of respiratory pathogens: influenza A virus, influenza B virus, human respiratory syncytial virus A/B, human adenovirus A/B/C/D/E/F, human coronavirus 229E/NL63/OC43, metapneumovirus, human rhinovirus A/B/C, human bocavirus 1/2/3/4, human parainfluenza virus 1/2/3/4, Haemophilus influenzae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, Legionella pneumophila, and Bordetella pertussis.
Acute respiratory infections are the third leading cause of death worldwide, and account for 4.2 million deaths annually;more than 40% are children under five. The pathogens that cause these infections often are highly contagious, and infect susceptible individuals before tests can be commercialized. This project seeks to develop a point-of-care test that identifies a panel of bacteria and viruses, including drug-resistant strain of flu, from a single patient sample. This test could assist in the preparedness for global pandemics because of the ongoing availability of a test that can identify a broad panel of contagious respiratory pathogens. This strategy has the potential to eliminate the burden of having to quickly develop and commercialize single-organism tests in response to an emerging pandemic.
