[huridocs-tech] Handheld device 'could monitor HIV cheaply'

source: Science and Development Network
http://www.scidev.net/content/news/eng/handheld-device-could-monitor-hiv
-cheaply.cfm

Handheld device 'could monitor HIV cheaply'
Priya Shetty
19 July 2005
Source: SciDev.Net

Researchers have developed a cheap, fast and portable way of monitoring
HIV patients' immune systems.

They aim to develop it into a handheld device that could greatly improve
HIV treatment for people living in rural areas in poor countries with
few medical resources.

To assess when to give HIV patients antiretroviral drugs, healthcare
workers need to monitor the level of CD4 cells a type of immune cell  in
the patients' blood.

The current method of doing this in developed countries is costly and
requires large equipment and considerable technical expertise.

As a result, many of the millions of HIV-infected people living in
developing countries, often with inadequate healthcare, have had no
access to proper treatment.

In a paper published by PLoS Medicine this month, researchers say that
initial tests in 61 adults and six children showed that their device is
just as effective as the existing method.

The prototype works by mixing a drop of the patient's blood with
antibodies  proteins produced by the immune system to fight infection
that bind only to CD4 cells.

The antibodies have been altered to fluoresce under certain conditions.
This means that when a microscopic tool similar to a digital camera
takes a picture of the blood sample, a microchip counts the number of
CD4 cells automatically. The whole test takes about 10 minutes.

The research team, led by John T. McDevitt, University of Texas, United
States, says that because the device needs only tiny amounts of blood,
healthcare workers using it would be less exposed to HIV infection.

The need to develop the prototype is urgent, says Zvi Bentwich,
professor of medicine at Hebrew University Medical School, in an
accompanying article in the journal.

Bentwich comments that most efforts to provide antiretroviral drugs to
people with HIV in developing countries would be "highly likely to fail"
unless there is a better way of identifying those who need treatment.

Gabi Vercauteren, at the World Health Organization's department of
essential health technologies, told SciDev.Net that the device could
bring CD4 monitoring to people who currently have little access to it.

But she warns that introducing a portable technology would mean that
each healthcare worker would hold their own set of data, whereas in a
centralised laboratory information on people's HIV status would be kept
in one place.

Collating this data is important for long-term monitoring of HIV both
locally and nationally.

Vercauteren also raised the question of how much the device would cost,
something the researchers did not specify in their paper, nor in
interviews with SciDev.Net.

A company called LabNow is developing the technology further, says
William Rodriguez, lead author of the PLoS Medicine paper, who is based
at the Partners AIDS Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital,
United States.

Rodriguez and colleagues are now working on "even simpler
miniaturisation technologies to develop an even faster and less
expensive CD4 device".

Link to paper by William Rodriguez and colleagues:
http://www.plos.org/press/plme-02-07-rodriguez.pdf

Link to paper by Zvi Bentwich:
http://www.plos.org/press/plme-02-08-bentwich.pdf



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