Wired magazine has a fascinating piece from last month on the “ultimate medical diagnostic device” which is being developed in collaboration with the private sector. It is by Thomas Goetz who runs his own blog: Epidemix. Excerpts below:

“Our inability to diagnose and track infectious disease quickly and accurately remains a serious problem…The problem with cultures is that they take a long time — three weeks or more — to produce a definitive result. In those three weeks, antibiotics may be fortifying the bacteria’s resistance rather than curing the patient. In those three weeks, a TB patient goes back into the population and spreads disease. In those three weeks, the bacteria have enough time to escape our grasp. What’s needed, then, is a new way to diagnose the disease: one at least as fast as the sputum microscopy test, as accurate as the culture, and refined enough to differentiate between garden-variety bacteria and drug-resistant strains. What’s needed is nothing less than a new gold standard…Those tests might finally be at hand. There is a crop of diagnostic tools on the horizon… Dozens of companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop these new tools.”

“TruDiagnosis: It combines advances in microfluidics (miniaturized pumps and channels), microarrays (micron-sized sensors affixed to a chip), and engineering into what could be the ultimate medical gadget: a handheld device that, using a small sample of blood or spit, reveals in mere minutes every pathogen inside the body.”