Award-Winning Professor Brings Affordable Medical Testing to Indian Countryside

The COVID-19 pandemic posed several challenges to health workers, but it became a driving force for Indian Professor Suman Chakraborty and his team to develop affordable infection and disease diagnostic technologies.

Prof. Chakraborty told Sputnik that his creation's field trial is having a big impact in small towns and villages as it was especially developed for people living in remote and resource-constrained areas in India

He said that these tests for the detection of disease and infection work on a grassroots level amid extremely challenging conditions, including humid environments with no electricity or testing laboratory.

Here are some of the newly developed medical tests:

For quick diagnosis of pathogenic infections including SARS-CoV-2 and others, Prof. Chakraborty and his team developed COVIRAP technology which is a cuboid-shaped portable testing device.

To test for infections, the nasal, as well as oral swab samples, are taken and diluted in a solution and tested in the portable device.

With a simple customization in the pre-programming and settings, the testing device can be used for the detection of any infectious disease as per the specific test protocol.

"Unlike RT-PCR testing which is resource-intensive, this diagnostic device, which we have transferred to several companies and organizations, is easy to operate and detect infections and doesn't require a lot of manpower and materials," Prof. Chakraborty said.

Another is the 'Diagnostics with Finger-Prick Blood on Paper Strip' which can quantitatively measure plasma glucose, hemoglobin, creatinine, and lipid profile. It can be used for mass screening of several non-communicable diseases.

The finger-prick blood samples collected on a paper-strip test assess the parameters on a smartphone-based app.

"This ultra-low-cost rapid test device requires just a small drop of blood instead of drawing a good volume of blood to test a large number of tests. Moreover, you don't require a lab or expensive device and you don't need to wait long for the result. It's instant and results are the gold standard," Prof. Chakraborty told Sputnik.

The early detection and diagnosis of oral cancer can become simple and easy to do with the new low-cost portable torch-like hand-held imaging device.

Unlike the biopsy or histopathology method for the detection of oral cancer, this new device is a non-clinical method that provides thermal imaging which measures any change in the blood flow rate of tissue.

"This method can be extended to other forms of cancer. The device has successfully passed phase-I clinical trial and has entered into field trial mode," Prof. Chakraborty said.

A folded paper kit has been developed to detect antibiotic resistance to medicines.

"The bacteria sample is taken and tested along with a small sample of each possible type of medicine to assess the susceptibility of the bacteria to medicine by simply tracking the color changes on the spots after four hours. If the color changes from blue to pink, it means that the medicine is working," Prof. Chakraborty said.

The new reagent-free anemia detection technology works on blood patterns spreading on a moist paper strip.

"The pattern carries the signature of the red blood cell contents that classifies and tells who is anemic and who is normal and [who is] interpreted to be grossly different when analyzed via a custom-made image-analytics app," Prof. Chakraborty stated.