Fighting deadly parasitic infections with a UV flashlight

Music

>>Ellen Beaulieu: My name is Ellen Beaulieu and I'm a medicinal chemist in infectious disease at SRI International. Every day I develop new therapies and new diagnostics for different infectious diseases such a parasitic infection as well as antimicrobial. Early detection invariably leads to better treatment outcomes and we really want to be able to effectively identify a patient population and you do this with diagnostics. This diagnostic is intended to detect parasites that cause three different human diseases; Chogas disease which predominates in Central and South America, African sleeping sickness which predominates on the African continent and leishmaniasis which has a worldwide distribution. These infections cause hundreds of thousands of new cases each year among the three of them and are second only to malaria in terms of death by parasite. Basically we've developed a panel of dyes which when the parasite infection is not present are not fluorescent. However, when the patient has a parasite infection there is a small molecule inside the parasite that it absolutely unique to the parasite and not found in the patient and so when that's present it binds to a sensor domain on our dye and you get a very bright yellow green fluorescent response indicating the patient may have succumb to a parasitic infection. Our goal ultimately is to make a very low cost, low technology diagnostic and we're doing that by using a handheld UV flashlight to do the detection in this diagnostic. My life is always going to be interesting in terms of finding new things to investigate.

Music

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====