Unlike most commercially-available genetic diagnostic tests which require suspected pathogens to be identified before analysis, the new test enables detection without knowing which pathogens are present in the sample. The DNA test was used successfully on blood samples from two African patients who had acute hemorrhagic fever by a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
To speed diagnosis time, the research team developed new visualization and analysis software to leverage nanopore sequencing, an emerging DNA-sequencing technology. This enabled them to reduce the detection time of Ebola from days to hours.
“This point-of-care genomic technology will be particularly attractive in the developing world, where critical resources, including reliable electric power, laboratory space, and computational server capacity, are often severely limited,” Charles Chiu, MD, author of the study, said in a statement. “Unbiased point-of-care testing for pathogens by rapid metagenomic sequencing has the potential to radically transform infectious disease diagnosis in both clinical and public health settings.”
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