University of Colorado researchers have invented a small but potent tool that health officials worldwide might use to stop bird flu. Talk about timely – the device comes along none too soon.
The “flu chip” inventors, Kathy Rowlen and Rob Kuchta, are professors of chemistry and biochemistry in Boulder. Their device could be put into widespread use within a year, just as global efforts are being made to forestall a deadly disease.
Avian influenza is predicted to mutate into a form that can transmit from person to person, potentially igniting a worldwide pandemic akin to the 1918 outbreak that killed more than 20 million people. Researchers are scrambling to develop effective vaccines – but they’re also desperate for ways to discern whether an outbreak is really an avian strain or a less worrisome virus that mimics bird flu’s early stages.
Rapid, reliable identification of flu viruses thus is key to stopping the flu’s spread. That’s the problem the CU scientists may have solved.
If officials know who really carries bird flu, they can send those patients to the hospital, where standard infectious-disease protocols should stop the virus from spreading. Early identification also will let health agencies send vaccine shipments to areas where bird flu cases have been confirmed.
Tests currently in use are able to determine which flu strain an ill person has, but it takes several days to get results. The delay can be deadly with a disease as contagious as bird flu. The “flu chips” speed up the process, delivering results in 11 hours, but researchers hope to further reduce that to just an hour or two.
The flu chips are the size of microscope slides and dotted with pieces of genetic material. Various viruses stick to different dots on the slide, forming patterns that show the strain of flu. The chips are 90 percent accurate, but researchers want to further improve reliability.
The technology was developed in five years using a $2 million grant from the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases.
Using flu chips, doctors might be able to quickly steer patients to life-saving treatment in quarantine, halting the disease’s spread. In other cases, results will allow doctors to reassure patients that they have a less worrisome virus and it’s OK to just go home and be miserable.
What Rowlen and Kuchta accomplished, with the help of federal research dollars, may be the rare breakthrough with immediate, life-saving results.
