Tuberculosis

Dr. Francis Nano will lead this project in coordination with Dr. Tatyana Hamilton, who will coordinate activities with scientists in Russia.

Tuberculosis (TB) affects nine million people annually. On average, an untreated patient infects 15 others. Early case detection and treatment are crucial to stop the epidemic. Sputum smear fluorescence microscopy is the recommended method to detect TB but accessibility to it is limited in resource-poor settings. Combining a specialized lens, image processing software and widely available camera phones, this innovation will create an easy-to-use, intelligent sputum smear reader that will help improve TB diagnosis.

This project will evaluate the electronic nose as a point of care test for the early detection of tuberculosis (TB). Successful evaluation will encourage worldwide use of this device for early detection and immediate treatment for control of TB: a mandate of the World Health Organization.

Tuberculosis was responsible for 3800 deaths everyday in 2010. A quick and accurate diagnostic tool for latent and drug-resistant tuberculosis could save a quarter of lives claimed by tuberculosis annually. We are proposing to develop a novel single diagnostic assay which is rapid, highly sensitive and can diagnose active, latent and drug-resistant tuberculosis.

This project aims to evaluate the usefulness of sweat in early and accurate diagnosis. Sweat, a common symptom in TB, is been used extensively in cystic fibrosis. This idea will assist in global plan to control TB. It helps patients take a pro-active role in diagnosis at very little expense, so it can be involved early in the diagnostic process. We hope that a TB sweat test will be developed if this idea is successful in Nigeria.

We developed an immuno-diagnostic kit based on lipid antigen detection in patients body fluids, for early diagnosis of pulmonary and extra-pulmonary tuberculosis. It has been validated in laboratory for sensitivity and specificity. The test proved extremely sensitive and specific for early diagnosis of tuberculosis. The kit is extremely cost effective.

Our bold idea is to develop a low-cost platform for rapid detection of tuberculosis in low-income countries. Here, at the Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University and in collaboration with the BigTech Labs in India, we will design and build a low-cost and electricity free thermal cycler that amplifies the myobacteria’s DNA in sputum samples. We envision that our device will be extremely useful in remote areas, where access to standard lab infrastructure is limited. Follow Mohsen Akbari on Twitter @sina_a81  "

The project addresses the need for sensitive point-of-care diagnostic tools for tuberculosis in HIV infected people by optimising the LAM assay with biosensor and aptamer technology. Implications are a reduction of time to diagnosis tuberculosis, leading to better management and decreased spread of tuberculosis.

The accurate diagnosis of active TB, including drug-resistant forms, requires methods that can detect very small quantities of DNA from the TB bacteria in the infected person. Using destabilizing DNA that can be routinely made with common reagents, a small fragment of the TB DNA sequence can be amplified and detected without temperature cycling.

Cell culture is the gold standard for in TB diagnosis. It is inexpensive, provides viability and drug resistance information, but takes 4-6 weeks. Through miniaturization and parallelization of sample analysis, we propose to reduce the assay time to a few hours and obtain viability information.