A new magnetic method has been developed that can detect malaria, leading to faster, accurate and cheap diagnosis of the deadly disease.
An international study field-tested this new tool in Papua New-Guinea, in the hopes of helping the fight against this disease, which had 229 million reported cases in 2019, with 700 000 deaths a year.
“Malaria is easily treated but it is actually hard to diagnose, and because of that there can be over-treatment, which we have seen can lead to the spread of drug-resistant malaria,” said Dr Stephan Karl, a Senior Research Fellow in Malaria and Vector Biology at James Cook University’s Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine.
“Improving malaria diagnosis, especially through the development of practical methods for resource-limited places, is important and timely,” he said.
An international team including the University of Augsburg’s Professor Istvan Kezsmarki, with the PNG Institute of Medical Research and the Burnet Institute, came up with the magnetic detection method, called rotating-crystal magneto-optical detection (RMOD).
When malaria parasites break down blood, the haeme molecules are aggregated by the parasites into biocrystals called haemezoin, which contain magnetic iron. This iron can is detectable by the RMOD method.
“I’ve studied the magnetic properties of malaria infected blood since 2006, and we engaged with Professor Kezsmarki’s team in 2013 to demonstrate the sensitivity of this test using human malaria parasites,” Dr Karl said.
A field study was successfully conducted, involving almost 1000 suspected malaria patients in a high-transmission area of Papua New-Guinea.
“After years of in-lab optimisation of the device, in collaboration with Dr. Karl we demonstrated the great potential of RMOD in fast and reliable malaria field tests performed in Papua New-Guinea,” Prof Kezsmarki said.
“We showed that RMOD performs well in comparison to the most reliable existing method..It’s very promising, as RMOD testing can be conducted after a short training session and provides test results within 10 minutes. From a funding perspective the cost is very low since no expensive reagents are used,” said Dr Karl.
Dr Karl said the aim was to refine the design until a test could be done by a simple button push.
Source: Medical Xpress
Journal information: L. Arndt et al, Magneto-optical diagnosis of symptomatic malaria in Papua New Guinea, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21110-w
