Point-of-care Ebola detection

Scientists have developed a handheld instrument, about the size of a smartphone, that detects Ebola quickly and could be used in remote locations. Described in the American Chemical Society journal Analytical Chemistry, the device serves as a speedy alternative to monitoring the virus in laboratories with trained personnel.

The gold standard method for identifying the Ebola virus in a blood sample requires packaging samples in cooled containers and sending them to specialised laboratories, often far away from where patients live. Lab personnel use a method called reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to check for the virus. The prolonged testing process delays detection, treatment and real-time monitoring of viral loads in body fluids that can harbour the virus even after it’s no longer detected in blood.

To make reliable and fast Ebola detection more accessible, Pavel Neuzil and colleagues developed a smartphone-sized device which can simultaneously perform four RT-PCR tests. While conventional tests require several hours to more than a day for results to come in, the new process takes less than 37 min and uses a minute amount of blood, which could potentially come from just a finger prick.

The device successfully detected the Ebola RNA, not only diagnosing the illness but also yielding information about how many RNA copies each sample contained. The researchers say the tool could also potentially help healthcare workers track patients’ viral loads in semen, breast milk and eye fluids after recovery.