A Cheap and Useful Kit for Malaria Diagnosis in Saliva

Oscar Noya at the Instituto de Medicina Tropical in Venezuela will develop a simple, low-cost test based on the detection of parasite antigens that can be used to diagnose malaria in low-resource settings. They have developed a multi-antigen blot assay that can diagnose 26 diseases at the same time using saliva or small volumes of blood at low cost without the need for specialized equipment. They will use bioinformatics tools to select synthetic peptides from the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and from other common pathogens such as HIV and dengue virus. The synthesized peptides will be spotted on cellulose paper and tested for their ability to detect the corresponding disease from sera and saliva samples taken from at-risk populations.