A Portable HIV Test That Provides Results In Minutes

One day soon, consumers may have more than just sketchy Internet information to help them self-diagnose maladies. A Cambridge (Mass)-based company called Nanobiosym says it has developed a portable rapid diagnostics device that will allow users to accurately test for many diseases in under an hour. All that’s required is a drop of blood, saliva, or another bodily fluid, depending on the test being done. Called Gene-Radar, the iPad-sized device is still being perfected and awaits regulatory approval. Nanobiosym hopes it will help add mobility and personalization to health care and become a game-changer in developing countries.

In the developed world, for example, getting HIV test results may take up to two weeks and cost up to $200. It can be a lot more difficult in developing countries: In Rwanda, blood samples are typically collected by health-care workers, who then send them to a centralized lab facility. “They would have to ship the blood–and sometimes they don’t even have cold storage–through some kind of transportation system, over roads that have potholes,” says Dr. Anita Goel, a Harvard-MIT trained physicist and physician, and founder and chief executive officer of Nanobiosym. “And if [the sample] doesn’t get damaged or rotten along the way … it will take about six months to run the test.” Next, a second health-care worker must track down the patient to deliver the results. “In practice, the patient may have died, moved on, spread the disease,” says Goel. “It’s very impractical.”