A new test from MIT researchers could make it easier to quickly diagnose Ebola, yellow fever, dengue fever, and more, helping health-care workers decide whether a patient needs immediate treatment and isolation.

“As we saw with the recent Ebola outbreak, sometimes people present with symptoms and it’s not clear what they have,” says Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, a visiting scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s technical staff.
Currently, the only way to diagnose Ebola is to send blood samples to a lab that can perform advanced techniques such as polymerase chain reaction, which can detect genetic material from the Ebola virus. However, many areas of Africa where Ebola and other fevers are endemic have limited access to this technology.
The new device, similar to a pregnancy test, consists of a strip of paper coated at one end with separate stripes of red, orange, and green nanoparticles. Made from silver, the nanoparticles are linked to antibodies recognizing Ebola, dengue fever, and yellow fever, respectively. As blood serum flows along the paper, viral proteins pick up the corresponding antibody-nanoparticle complex and keep moving. Farther along the strip, separate sets of antibodies for each disease grab the viral proteins (and the antibodies and nanoparticles they’ve caught), depositing bands of color for each positive result. This process takes about 10 minutes.
“If you’re in a situation in the field with no power and no special technologies, if you want to know if a patient has Ebola, this test can tell you very quickly that you might not want to put that patient in a waiting room with other people who might not be infected,” says Lee Gehrke, a professor of health sciences and technology in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), who began working on the new device with Hamad-Schifferli four years ago.
Keep Reading
Most Popular

A quick guide to the most important AI law you’ve never heard of
The European Union is planning new legislation aimed at curbing the worst harms associated with artificial intelligence.

It will soon be easy for self-driving cars to hide in plain sight. We shouldn’t let them.
If they ever hit our roads for real, other drivers need to know exactly what they are.

Crypto is weathering a bitter storm. Some still hold on for dear life.
When a cryptocurrency’s value is theoretical, what happens if people quit believing?

Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order
An MIT Technology Review series investigates how AI is enriching a powerful few by dispossessing communities that have been dispossessed before.
Stay connected

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.