Blood Sample Preparation for Sensitive HIV Detection in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Salus Discovery in the U.S. will optimize a prototype of their simple and inexpensive SnapTab platform technology for processing of finger-prick blood for HIV diagnostic testing. SnapTab components and chemistry will be optimized for blood plasma separation, viral lysis, and in a final step, nucleic acid purification and stabilization. The output can then be directly used in standard quantitative PCR amplification reactions for HIV detection. To evaluate the performance of SnapTab for HIV, sample extraction/purification results will be compared against existing approaches including the plasma separation card and traditional bead-based processing of plasma.