Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Following up on our bird flu blog of yesterday, Alan McNally from Nottingham Trent University contacted the Great Beyond to provide us with some more science.
The consortium developing his portable testing machine for bird flu, consists of eight European partners, says McNally, who are developing a portable device for detecting not just bird flu, but a wide range of influenza A and influenza B viruses, as well as other respiratory viruses. For the influenza A viruses, which includes bird flu, the device will have the extra capability of being able to identify which type of influenza A virus it is, for example a human virus (H1 and H3) or an avian virus (H5, H7 and H9). It will also be able to specify what the N type of the virus is, such as the highly pathogenic H5N1, or the H9N2 type which is hitting the news today.
The device will “duplicate reference laboratory standards in the field” in the same two hour timeframe that can be achieved in the laboratory. This can remove the potentially lengthy delay due to travel times to reference laboratories currently required for confirmation of an outbreak.
“While a reference laboratory can get a full result with a partial sequence in a day, the samples have to be sent to one of these laboratories first which can take a long time” says McNally.
What has been done already on this project is that the consortium has developed the methods that the equipment will use, based on methods currently used in international reference laboratories, such as the Veterinary Laboratories Agency at Weybridge where Dr McNally used to work. The technology is a combination of PCR and microarray for which they have designed the primers and probes, with testing and validation almost complete. So now it is up to the hardware developers to put this technology in a portable form.
McNally adds that the device will be future-proofed: “We will be able to add in new capabilities for new viruses as they emerge.”
And the reason for bringing out a press release now? European Union bureaucracy (or research bureaucracy more general). Despite the research starting in January, the contracts have only been finalised recently.