At the AACC annual meeting and expo in 2015, the researchers will show some findings that a first of its kind Smartphone DNA Test and Smartphone test for Chlamydia information and may diagnose the disease with high accuracy ratio. It can help in lowering down the cases of STD by making Chlamydia easy to screen and in a cheaper manner. All of the people with Chlamydia are not fully conscious of its effects, probably because the infection normally has no signs at all, however, if it will be left untreated, it can progress into pelvic inflammation and there will be permanent damages to the reproductive system of a woman.

Pelvic inflammatory disease

Pelvic inflammatory disease actually affects 30% of women with Chlamydia; it can also lead to infertility, chronic pelvic pain, ectopic pregnancies, and others. Through the years, the healthcare practitioners never stopped in seeking for screening programs for Chlamydia, good thing there are highly developed and sensitive methodology called the nucleic acid amplification test or NAAT. This is quite complex, but when it comes to the point of care system; its price is quite higher.

The responsible for this research is a team of researchers from Baltimore. They have formulated and developed the very first low cost NAAT platform that may be capable of detecting Chlamydia at the point of care and it also assimilates a sample preparation, including the DNA amplification, data processing and others in a small sized instrument, called as the mobiLab. This device is a battery operated device that will work with the use of a micro fluidics cartridge to know the DNA of the Chlamydia bacteria in the swab samples taken from the woman’s genitals. The DNA analysis unit will integrate with the smart device, which will allow the user to maneuver the platform and access the test data with an app.

Gen Probe Aptima Combo   

The mobiLab’s developers are to validate the preciseness of the test by doing a comparison with the performance with the Gen Probe Aptima Combo, which is the standard test use to test Chlamydia. After using the test of twenty patients using both test kits, the researchers found out that mobiLab along with Gen Probe both released the same results, ten negative results and ten positive results. This shows that mobiLab can also be used to replace the standard NAATs. Moreover, every micro fluidics cartridge uses less than $2 and this is cheaper compared to a commercialized cartridge which has the same use and may cost around $10 each.

All at once, this can make it probable for a huge number of non-conventional types of healthcare systems to be able to afford and offer Chlamydia tests and to also be able to screen a wider part of those who are at risk among women. Now that there is a quite precise, specific molecular assays to know a few numbers of organisms in a biological sample and is sensitive enough according to an author.  However, most of the technologies are limited to being used in a centralized lab environment. If they can bring the molecular diagnostic closer to the clinic and then bring precise outcomes very soon, then the standard of patient care for those with Chlamydia will be more affordable.

Contributor: admin