About SnapLab

Health inequalities are still striking the poorest of us, causing many deaths. Poor sanitary conditions allow epidemics such as cholera to spread quite easily through infected fluids. By observing the current situation in Yemen, where a child is infected with cholera every 35 seconds, this infection is definitely an urgent matter to which too little attention is paid.

Different kinds of medical diagnosis exist but their specificity is far from being optimum. In fact, Vibrio Cholerae is the bacteria responsible for cholera. The tricky thing is that there are only two serogroups of Vibrio Cholerae O1 and O139 that are responsible for epidemics of cholera while the others provoke diarrheas, abscess or septicemia.

This is why we are going to design a pathogen sensitive detector, allowing an easier and more specific diagnostic : SnapLab, our portable kit that will detect cholera.

After extracting DNA from the feces and performing the analysis, a nucleic acid sequence will be detected if the patient is infected with cholera. Once these sequences are introduced into the bacteria, fluorescence will be emitted and captured by the camera of a smartphone. The application that we will design will not only perform the analysis but it will also do the image processing. Plus, the temperature will continuously be monitored within the kit and this exact same test will be possible with water to differentiate infected water from non infected water.

The greatest advantage of this device will be its capability to communicate the results to its user and to map the cases of cholera. That way, we will be able to know which area is the most affected by the epidemic.

Going forward, this kind of device will be replicable for different pathogens, thus allowing to widen the spectrum of this kit’s use.