Innovations in the field of life sciences-2009: No. 2
2nd place according to The Scientist. Rapid identification of pathogensIn the event of an outbreak of an unknown deadly infectious disease, delay can cost many human lives.
Therefore, David Ecker, who attended the biosafety conference held by the government in the 90s, was disappointed with even the best of the proposed ideas for pathogen identification. According to him, it was only about Gram coloring.
Ecker, who was working at Ibis Biosciences at the time, used mass spectrometry to test the ability of experimental drugs to bind to RNA. To do this, he compared the atomic mass of bound RNA with the atomic mass of a free (lighter molecule). He came up with the idea to identify the genomes of pathogens based on differences in their mass.
The complexity of the task, which was eventually solved, was to create universal primers for polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which would interact with the "preserved" regions found in the genomes of all pathogenic organisms belonging to one of the known classes. The part of the pathogen genome that falls between such primers and is amplified during PCR is sufficiently variable to recognize a single strain or subtype belonging to a particular class of pathogens.
To date, this technique has not yet been approved for clinical trials and diagnostic procedures, but it is already being used to test the level of mutations in the genomes of viruses. It has also found application in forensic medicine and other fields, including being used to identify a new strain of H1N1 influenza by epidemiologists of the US Navy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the end of last year, after the acquisition of technology by Abbott Laboratories, Ibis and Abbott engineers developed a more convenient version of the device for such procedures, called PLEX-ID. The Wall Street Journal called the new device, which costs more than $ 100,000 (processing one sample costs $ 30-40), the innovation of the year.