Difference between revisions of "Team:Pasteur Paris/test/Description"

Project Inspiration and Description

To this day, numerous medical TV shows are based on the difficulties of diagnosing diseases quickly. What if a device could allow a precise and instantaneous diagnosis of a disease?

Viewing a more serious and realistic situation, today, someone dies of sepsis every 5 seconds in the world. Sepsis is a clinical syndrome of organ malfunction potentially fatal provoked by a deregulated host response to the infection. Its current diagnosis relies on hemoculture, Hemoculture is a slow process, while every hour spent to detect which strain is responsible for the infection greatly enhances the risks of neurological and muscular complications and drastically reduces the chances of survival.

In this context, we decided to create DIANE (Diagnosis is Now Easier).

Time is a crucial element. The doctors often have to act even before getting the results of the analysis and launch a broad empirical antibiotic treatment based on hypothesis regarding the origin of the infection. This can lead to an inadequate and thus inefficient treatment, a loss of time and can eventually result in the diminution of the patient’s chances of survival. DIANE would be a major tool against sepsis, but not only. More broadly, it could be used for any situation suggesting a bacterial infection with the advantages of being almost instantaneous, specific and selective. A rapid diagnosis would allow to provide the proper antibiotic treatment immediately and therefore to enhance the chances of survival, to reduce the complications due to the infection, as well as contributing to the fight against antimicrobial resistance, which is one of the biggest current threats for the global public health.

This device relies on an electrochemical detection of bacteria in a specific way using aptamers, single-strand RNA or DNA capable of binding to a specific ligand, connected to carbon nanotubes electrodes.

We will perform the SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands By Exponential Enrichment) method to obtain these aptamers and with them build electrodes with high specificity.