Infectious diseases can be treated at a low cost

1995 ◽  
Vol &NA; (976) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
&NA;
Keyword(s):  
Biomolecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1072
Author(s):  
Raquel Cid ◽  
Jorge Bolívar

To date, vaccination has become one of the most effective strategies to control and reduce infectious diseases, preventing millions of deaths worldwide. The earliest vaccines were developed as live-attenuated or inactivated pathogens, and, although they still represent the most extended human vaccine types, they also face some issues, such as the potential to revert to a pathogenic form of live-attenuated formulations or the weaker immune response associated with inactivated vaccines. Advances in genetic engineering have enabled improvements in vaccine design and strategies, such as recombinant subunit vaccines, have emerged, expanding the number of diseases that can be prevented. Moreover, antigen display systems such as VLPs or those designed by nanotechnology have improved the efficacy of subunit vaccines. Platforms for the production of recombinant vaccines have also evolved from the first hosts, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to insect or mammalian cells. Traditional bacterial and yeast systems have been improved by engineering and new systems based on plants or insect larvae have emerged as alternative, low-cost platforms. Vaccine development is still time-consuming and costly, and alternative systems that can offer cost-effective and faster processes are demanding to address infectious diseases that still do not have a treatment and to face possible future pandemics.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravindra B Malabadi ◽  
Advaita Ganguly ◽  
Jaime A Teixeira da Silva ◽  
Archana Parashar ◽  
Mavanur R Suresh ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT - This review highlights the advantages and current status of plant-derived vaccine development with special reference to the dengue virus. There are numerous problems involved in dengue vaccine development, and there is no vaccine against all four dengue serotypes. Dengue vaccine development using traditional approaches has not been satisfactory in terms of inducing neutralizing antibodies. Recently, these issues were addressed by showing a very good response to inducing neutralizing antibodies by plant-derived dengue vaccine antigens. This indicates the feasibility of using plant-derived vaccine antigens as a low-cost method to combat dengue and other infectious diseases. The application of new methods and strategies such as dendritic cell targeting in cancer therapy, severe acute respiratory syndrome, tuberculosis, human immune deficiency virus, and malaria might play an important role. These new methods are more efficient than traditional protocols. It is expected that in the near future, plant-derived vaccine antigens or antibodies will play an important role in the control of human infectious diseases. This article is open to POST-PUBLICATION REVIEW. Registered readers (see “For Readers”) may comment by clicking on ABSTRACT on the issue’s contents page.


2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 16-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Cline ◽  
R. Luo ◽  
K. Kuhlmann

Many infectious diseases prevalent in the developing world, including malaria and tuberculosis, are difficult to diagnose on the basis of symptoms alone but can be accurately detected using microscope examination. Currently the expense, size, and fragility of optical microscopes impede their widespread use in resource-limited settings. Addressing these obstacles facing microscopy in the developing world is a pressing need; over 800,000 people, primarily children in Africa, die annually of malaria, and more than 1,500,000 people die annually of tuberculosis [1][2]. The aim of this study is to design and validate a microscope for use in the developing world that combines high-resolution imaging, extreme affordability, and long-term durability.


Micromachines ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1003
Author(s):  
Saghi Forouhi ◽  
Ebrahim Ghafar-Zadeh

Emerging infectious diseases such as coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19), Ebola, influenza A, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in recent years have threatened the health and security of the global community as one of the greatest factors of mortality in the world. Accurate and immediate diagnosis of infectious agents and symptoms is a key to control the outbreak of these diseases. Rapid advances in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology offers great advantages like high accuracy, high throughput and rapid measurements in biomedical research and disease diagnosis. These features as well as low cost, low power and scalability of CMOS technology can pave the way for the development of powerful devices such as point-of-care (PoC) systems, lab-on-chip (LoC) platforms and symptom screening devices for accurate and timely diagnosis of infectious diseases. This paper is an overview of different CMOS-based devices such as optical, electrochemical, magnetic and mechanical sensors developed by researchers to mitigate the problems associated with these diseases.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 463-464
Author(s):  
Musa Mohd Nordin ◽  
Husna Musa

As the number of COVID-19 cases continues to rise with over 65 million recorded cases and more than 1.5 million mortalities as of early December, the race against time to find a vaccine intensifies. In recent years, there has been growing interest in mRNA-based technology for the development of prophylactic vaccines against infectious diseases and even for cancers and allergies. The prospects for mRNA vaccines are very promising because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration. However, until now, no vaccines using this technology have made it this far in clinical trials thus there have been concerns on the therapeutic and possible adverse effects and claims especially on social media that the vaccines will alter the DNA. This article discusses the unique attributes of mRNA vaccines and current challenges and expectations within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.20(2) 2021 p.463-464


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Si-Wei Zhao ◽  
Chong-Rui Guo ◽  
Ying-Zhu Hu ◽  
Yuan-Ru Guo ◽  
Qing-Jiang Pan

AbstractThe infectious diseases caused by various bacteria pose serious threat to human health. To solve this problem, antibacterial agents have been widely used in people’s daily life to deactivate or kill these bacteria. Among the antibacterial agents, ZnO is one of the most promising metal oxide antibacterial agents due to its non-toxic nature and safe properties. To expand its application, many composites of ZnO have been widely studied. Cellulose, as one of the most abundant biopolymers, has many merits like biodegradability, biocompatibility and low cost. Thus, many studies focus on synthesized cellulose/ZnO. The synthetic strategy includes both chemical and physical methods. Many of them have been shown that cellulose/ZnO composites have excellent antibacterial activity and are environment-friendly and have many applications for example food packing, antibacterial fibers and so on. This review mainly discusses the preparation methods of cellulose/ZnO and their effect on the morphology and properties.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feiyun Cui ◽  
Zhiru Zhou ◽  
H. Susan Zhou

Owing to their merits of simple, fast, sensitive, and low cost, electrochemical biosensors have been widely used for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. As a critical element, the receptor determines the selectivity, stability, and accuracy of the electrochemical biosensors. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) and surface imprinted polymers (SIPs) have great potential to be robust artificial receptors. Therefore, extensive studies have been reported to develop MIPs/SIPs for the detection of infectious diseases with high selectivity and reliability. In this review, we discuss mechanisms of recognition events between imprinted polymers with different biomarkers, such as signaling molecules, microbial toxins, viruses, and bacterial and fungal cells. Then, various preparation methods of MIPs/SIPs for electrochemical biosensors are summarized. Especially, the methods of electropolymerization and micro-contact imprinting are emphasized. Furthermore, applications of MIPs/SIPs based electrochemical biosensors for infectious disease detection are highlighted. At last, challenges and perspectives are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. 1650044 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qin Huang ◽  
Shanqiao Han ◽  
Yan Zhang ◽  
Yue Kou ◽  
Xiaohang Zhao ◽  
...  

Molecular diagnostics is one of the most important tools currently in use for clinical pathogen detection due to its high sensitivity, specificity, and low consume of sample and reagent is keyword to low cost molecular diagnostics. In this paper, a sensitive DNA isothermal amplification method for fast clinical infectious diseases diagnostics at aM concentrations of DNA was developed using a polycarbonate (PC) microfluidic chip. A portable confocal optical fluorescence detector was specifically developed for the microfluidic chip that was capable of highly sensitive real-time detection of amplified products for sequence-specific molecular identification near the optical diffraction limit with low background. The molecular diagnostics of Listeria monocytogenes with nucleic acid extracted from stool samples was performed at a minimum DNA template concentration of 3.65[Formula: see text]aM, and a detection limit of less than five copies of genomic DNA. Contrast to the general polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at eppendorf (EP) tube, the detection time in our developed method was reduced from 1.5[Formula: see text]h to 45[Formula: see text]min for multi-target parallel detection, the consume of sample and reagent was dropped from 25[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]L to 1.45[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]L. This novel microfluidic chip system and method can be used to develop a micro total analysis system as a clinically relevant pathogen molecular diagnostics method via the amplification of targets, with potential applications in biotechnology, medicine, and clinical molecular diagnostics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 129 ◽  
pp. 02015
Author(s):  
Katerina Prihodova

Research background: Globalization has both positive and negative consequences. For more than a year, the whole world has been feeling very strongly about one of the negative consequences of globalization. And that is the rapid spread of infectious diseases. Within a few months of the first COVID-19 diseases, a pandemic occurred. The most common symptoms of this disease are fever, muscle aches, fatigue, loss of appetite and difficulty breathing. Therefore, it is essential to control body temperature reliably. If the process of temperature monitoring takes place in closed spaces, and simultaneously, the identification of a person is necessary, we propose a low-cost solution. This consists of using a mobile device in combination with a thermal camera for capturing people and subsequent evaluation using classification methods. Purpose of the article: The aim of this article is to create a model of a system for self-shooting. Follows recognition of elevated body temperature of persons and their identification to reduce the global impact of COVID-19 on the economy and society. Methods: A mobile device (tablet) combined with a thermal camera is used as a sensor. This is followed by face detection in both visible and thermal images. Methods of artificial intelligence (convolutional neural networks) are used for subsequent classifications of individual persons. Findings & Value added: The proposed model of self-sensing and subsequent identification of persons and their classification into groups (increased body temperature, normal temperature). In places where it is necessary to identify people, the system also detects elevated body temperature. This will help fight the spread of infectious diseases, which are characterized by fever.


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