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From 2014.igem.org

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Project Description

Infectious diseases including dengue fever, typhoid fever, and meningitis are symptomatically similar to malaria, and thus are often misdiagnosed in resource-poor developing countries lacking suitable medical diagnostic facilities. The lack of reliable rapid diagnostic tests to diagnose diseases, such as typhoid fever and meningitis, and a reduced capacity to perform standard tests to accurately diagnose these diseases contribute significantly to the problem of misdiagnosis. Due to these diagnostic challenges, patients can also undergo treatment for multiple diseases like malaria and typhoid fever despite a lack of confirmed diagnosis of co-infection. Improper treatment may prolong illness and cause adverse side effects in patients, in addition to a loss of faith in established health services. Misdiagnosis can also result in increased economic burdens and anti-malarial drug resistance. In Sudan, the 2000 annual cost of both treatment and diagnosis of malaria was $100 million USD whereas the calculated cost of accurate malaria diagnosis was approximately $14 million USD.

To address this issue, the iGEM Calgary 2014 team is using synthetic biology to develop a novel, genome-based, rapid point-of-care device to simultaneously diagnose multiple infectious diseases. We are engineering Bacillus subtilis to generate a chromophoric reporter protein in response to pathogenic genetic markers indicative of these diseases. These synthetic organisms will lie dormant as robust bacterial spores in a microfluidic device, enabling users to input blood samples and differentiate diseases based on colour of the output reporter proteins. Additionally, our system is a platform technology which can be adapted to detect a myriad of infectious agents by modifying the disease markers to which the system is targeted.