Health Diagnostics

Bastiaan Hoogendoorn at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom will develop a simple, inexpensive breath-testing device to measure the type and levels of bacteria in the lungs for rapid diagnosis of pneumonia in children in low-resource settings. Rather than condensing the exhaled breath, which can cause variation, the device directly captures respiratory fluid droplets containing non-volatile pathogen markers. These markers can then be identified using low-cost commercially available bioassay kits.

Patricia Hibberd of Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. will develop a low-cost thermal imaging system for a smart phone to diagnose bacterial pneumonia in children from developing countries where the standard chest X-ray is often unavailable. They predict that children with pneumonia specifically caused by bacteria will have asymmetric "hot spots" of high temperatures in the lungs caused by localized inflammation.

Joe Gallagher together with Chris Watson of University College Dublin in Ireland will develop a method to quickly and accurately diagnose bacterial pneumonia in children with acute respiratory infections so that the correct treatments can be given. Physical symptoms of bacterial pneumonia are similar to many other diseases including malaria but they require vastly different treatments.

Pavan Dadlani of Phillips Research in The Netherlands will create a handheld three-dimensional scanner that can automatically analyze body shape and assess malnutrition in young children, which is a strong risk factor for mortality associated with a variety of common diseases. Current physical measurements of children to assess nutritional status are time-consuming, uncomfortable for the child, and difficult to take accurately, particularly in low-resource settings.

Mark Ansermino of The University of British Columbia in Canada will adapt near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for the simple diagnosis and monitoring of children at increased risk of mortality from pneumonia. Children with moderate to severe malnutrition who develop pneumonia are far more likely to die than more nourished children, but diagnosing pneumonia in these individuals is problematic, likely due in part to muscle wasting that masks the classic symptoms of fast breathing and chest indrawing.

Mirko Zimic of Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru will develop a simple, low-cost lung ultrasound device that can automatically diagnose bacterial pneumonia and measure nutritional status in children in low-resource settings. They have developed an algorithm to detect lung infiltrates from digital ultrasound images as evidence of pneumonia in children, and have built a prototype device, which comprises an ultrasound probe connected to a laptop or smartphone for realtime analysis of the images. Visible and audio alerts are used to notify the technician of suspect regions.

Kaixia Mi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China will identify biomarkers that define the diagnosis and status of tuberculosis infection.

Tim Inglis from the University of Western Australia in Australia will develop a screening test that can be used in remote and low-resource settings to detect antibiotic resistance and ensure the right antibiotics can be prescribed. The emergence of antimicrobial resistance is a huge threat to global public health, and therefore needs to be accurately and rapidly detected, characterized and monitored. They will further develop their method based on flow cytometry that uses fluorescent dyes to rapidly detect changes in bacterial cells upon first exposure to an antibiotic.

Aaron Wheeler from the University of Toronto in Canada will develop a cost-effective, portable test that uses microfluidics to rapidly diagnose malaria from saliva samples. The digital microfluidic device is comprised of an array of electrodes over which droplets of samples and reagents can be moved around using a simple operating system. This allows the concentration of samples to enhance the specificity of the test, and the automation of an enzyme-linked immunosorbant assay to detect the presence of malaria antigens, along with a digital readout.

Robert Schlaberg from the University of Utah in the U.S. will develop an approach that can detect all viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites in post-mortem samples in order to identify the cause of death and inform disease-control efforts. Determining whether a specific pathogen caused the death of an individual is difficult with current methods partly because of the wide variety of pathogens and the potential for contamination of the tissues. They have developed an analysis tool - Taxonomer - that can identify individual pathogens from sequencing RNA in tissues.