Team:Duke/Applied Design
Applied Design
Best Applied Design Special Prize
Current HIV diagnostic testing administered in Sub-Saharan Africa costs 79 USD, must have a doctor present, and requires 4 weeks of waiting. However, given the slow time of confirmation and poor access to medical facilities, the current diagnostic is unacceptable in addressing the needs of the HIV epidemic. In order to minimize these health impacts, our rapid diagnostic lateral flow assay should remove the pressure from physicians and outsource HIV diagnostics to the household. With a quick, cheap, and accurate test using our thermostable griffithsin, people should be able to perform this test easily only with a few drops of blood.
We hope to introduce our model to both American and Sub-Saharan households. Given the emergence of 2.9 million cases every year and approximately 19 million people who don't know they have HIV, there is a clear application and need for our lateral flow assay. When compared to other commonly used means of diagnosis such as RNA and ELISA tests, our proposed model should be able to detect HIV earlier and be very easy to interpret (Figure 1).
Each the factors in this chart are important and emphasize the novelty and importance of our diagnostic tool. Paramount to our Lateral Flow Assay is its ability to detect HIV earlier. Research has been done to show if HIV can be detected earlier (within 3 weeks of infection) there will be much better health outcomes for the patient. Almost all of the tests currently available diagnose HIV after the fourth week once there is an antibody response. Since our diagnostic tool does not test for seroconversion or an immune response, this test is perfectly suitable to test young children, who often still have antibodies from their parents who may or may not have HIV or Zika antibodies to improve the accuracy of diagnosis.
