Immune Based Diagnosis
Immune based diagnosis is showing us the way to faster testing and diagnosis without the issues associated with more traditional tests. No longer does contamination become a problem with things like long running culture studies invalidating the results. Fast testing methods also help reduce the risk of evolving viruses. Furthermore, newer immune based studies may be smaller, in cartridge form and portable. This allows locations that have challenges with accessibility and resources to have access to cutting edge technology. If you live in a remote village that is poor, having equipment that required expensive maintenance and consumables such as short-lived isotope markers, that equipment become effectively useless.
Prescribing Medication: A Long-Term Challenge
Currently hospitals and medical staff worldwide are overusing antibiotics due to not knowing what they are treating. Not only are treatments over prescribed in terms of dosage but potentially aiding patient deaths due to the severity of the treatment while also not being effective at all. Before you can diagnose and treat anything you need to know what it is! If you are guessing, you are risking the patient’s life and your career.
Waiting for Results
So, why are people guessing what’s wrong with a patient? A major challenge is the extended waiting times to get results back from testing. Different studies can take up to days to complete and are potentially susceptible to contamination and other analytical challenges. With the antibiotic resistant infections that are in some respect caused by the current misdiagnoses currently occurring, failure to act could kill the patient.
Inaccessibility to Infection Site
Most technology used currently needs direct access to infection sites. For example, if the infection is in the lungs a biopsy may be needed; but may miss the target site and need to be conducted again. This is time consuming due to a preliminary scan, assessment and a theatre required before even getting to the testing stage of the process. Ear sampling also is a particular challenge; this can cause a lot of bleeding and discomfort to the sufferer and again take extensive time and resources.
False Diagnosis due to Bacterial Carriage
Most bacteria live in our body such as pneumonia as naturally occurring flora and fauna; so how do you test for pneumonia? It is likely you will provide a false diagnosis from standard tests as there is no additional information to substantiate an infection diagnosis. Without additional testing the answer is likely to be yes.
Biomimicry: Design Utilising Nature
Biomimicry is used to replicate similar designs observed in nature to take advantage of the millions of years nature has had to optimise its design. If we observe the immune system that detects and destroys the identified antigen, we see that a system is already established to assess what has entered the body and provides a way of dealing with it. Immunological diagnosis, takes the first part of this idea and runs with it. But how?
Observe Changes in the Host
The immune system in some part is still a mystery, and a field of study that is commercially lucrative once a discovery has been found and successfully commercialised. In terms of commercial growth, it is gaining even more traction from R&D success stories. Scientists are finding that it is the small details in the immune system that tells us more about the patient’s health than most conventional practices and potentially provide ways of how to maintain or restore it.
An example of a recently successful product has been a blood test that can be used to answer what first appears a simple question but can cause major challenges for clinicians; ‘is the patient suffering from a virus or bacterial infection?’. It works by taking information from proteins that enter the blood stream and tests for virus, bacteria and inflammation protein markers. The great thing is that not only does it bypass a lot of the challenges above it can be used in ELISA testing through easy already prepared cartridges. Want to figure out if a patient in the middle of nowhere has pneumonia, you can take a portal ELISA testing machine with a cartridge and find out if the infection is bacterial or viral. With some further questions and checks you are more certain that you got the diagnosis right and prescribed the right type and quantity of medication.
