Chips wage bio battles: Microarrays, labs-on-chip enlist for early avian-virus diagnosis

摘要

Portland, Ore.—The scenario makes public-health officials sweat: Avian flu breaks out here in Portland. By day 24, there are 104 dead and 6,414 infected. By day 42, the death toll has risen to 846 or more and the infection level to 33,246. Had the city followed the vaccinate-and-quarantine regimen prescribed by the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (Midas), however, just 362 would be dead and 2,564 infected, with 34,559 citizens under quarantine. The quest to diagnose flu cases early, as the first step in containing an outbreak, has a new ally in an emerging breed of microarrays and labs-on-chip. In the face of dire warnings about bird flu from the World Health Organization, biochip makers are gearing up to provide custom microarrays to screen for avian flu strain H5N1 and its close cousins. The version built at the University of Colorado, Boulder, under contract with the National Institutes of Health, has just come out of testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where a prototype microarray was exposed to a sample from a patient infected with avian flu. Meanwhile, STMicro-electronics says that its recently launched lab-on-chip, called In-Check, can be used to identify viruses like the flu. The nightmare scenario outlined for Pordand is no fantasy. It comes straight from Midas' epidemic modeler, EpiSims, based on earlier simulations of 1.6 million Portland residents frequenting 180,000 locations where they might infect one another. EpiSims, designed to model smallpox outbreaks, has been retooled to model pandemic influenza of the bird-flu type.