Now, get tested for Ebola within 10 minutes

Scientists have come up with quick test for Ebola that can diagnose the deadly disease within 10 minutes.

The new test from MIT researchers involves a device, a simple paper strip similar to a pregnancy test, that can rapidly diagnose Ebola, as well as other viral hemorrhagic fevers such as yellow fever and dengue fever.

The paper's lead author is IMES postdoc Chun-Wan Yen, and other authors are graduate student Helena de Puig, IMES postdoc Justina Tam, IMES instructor Jose Gomez-Marquez, and visiting scientist Irene Bosch.

The new device relies on lateral flow technology, which is used in pregnancy tests and has recently been exploited for diagnosing strep throat and other bacterial infections. Until now, however, no one has applied a multiplexing approach, using multicolored nanoparticles, to simultaneously screen for multiple pathogens.

Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor, who along with Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli is the senior author of a paper, said that for many hemorrhagic fever viruses, like West Nile and dengue and Ebola, and a lot of other ones in developing countries, like Argentine hemorrhagic fever and the Hantavirus diseases, there weren't rapid diagnostics at all.

Unlike most existing paper diagnostics, which test for only one disease, the new MIT strips are color-coded so they can be used to distinguish among several diseases. To achieve that, the researchers used triangular nanoparticles made of silver, which can take on different colors depending on their size.

The researchers created red, orange, and green nanoparticles and linked them to antibodies that recognize Ebola, dengue fever, and yellow fever. As a patient's blood serum flows along the strip, any viral proteins that match the antibodies painted on the stripes will get caught, and those nanoparticles will become visible. This can be seen by the naked eye; for those who are colorblind, a cellphone camera could be used to distinguish the colors.

Hamad-Schifferli said that when they ran a patient's sample through the strip, if there was an orange band, they have yellow fever, if it showed up as a red band they have Ebola, and if it showed up green, then they have dengue.

This type of device could also be customized to detect other viral hemorrhagic fevers or other infectious diseases, by linking the silver nanoparticles to different antibodies.

The study is published in the journal Lab on a Chip.