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A Johns Hopkins University-led team has created an inexpensive portable device and cellphone app to diagnose gonorrhea in less than 15 minutes and determine if a particular strain will respond to frontline antibiotics.
The invention improves on traditional testing in hospital laboratories and clinics, which typically takes up to a week to deliver results--time during which patients can unknowingly spread their infections. The team's results appear today in
Science Translational Medicine.
"Our portable, inexpensive testing platform has the potential to change the game when it comes to diagnosing and enabling rapid treatment of sexually transmitted infections," said team leader Tza-Huei Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering and core researcher at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. "It ensures that patients are diagnosed on the spot, and treatment can begin immediately, improving clinical outcomes. This will be especially valuable in low-resource settings, where well-equipped laboratories are not always available to every patient."