An Integrated Approach to a Portable and Low-Cost Immunoassay for Resource-Poor Settings

摘要

The development of technology for use in resource-poor countries encounters a specific type of challenge not ordinarily faced in academic science: the technology must be inexpensive and it must work with minimal infrastructure. This challenge is particularly severe when the problems being solved are, by their nature, ones that require high-technology solutions. For these kinds of problems, the elegance of the solutions must lie in the use of science to guide the assembly of readily available components into a simple, workable, and well-integrated package. In this paper, we describe an integrated approach to a miniaturized immunoassay called a "POCKET immunoassay" ("POCKET" is short for portable and cost-effective). This immunoassay has, we believe, the potential to be inexpensive and operable with minimal equipment and technical skills, and shows an analytical performance approaching that of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) performed in a bench-top format in clinical laboratories.