The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded a $5.3 million grant to Tim Rose, PhD, co-director of the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research, part of the Seattle Children's Research Institute, to develop a point-of-care tool to identify and track strains of influenza viruses faster and more effectively.
Dr. Rose received the grant in partnership with Micronics, a medical device company based in Redmond, Wash. The partnership will integrate Dr. Rose's Consensus-Degenerate Hybrid Oligonucleotide Primer detection methodology — which provides a way to detect low levels of a virus while being able to detect unknown and mutated members of a virus family — with Micronics' molecular diagnostic system, PanNAT. When used together, the CODEHOP and PanNAT technologies can provide a quick, point-of-care diagnosis.
The Seattle Children's Research Institute-Micronics team will create tests to detect new and unknown viruses and identify disease signatures of specific influenza strains. Then, once an emerging influenza strain is identified, the system can help track its spread. This will help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other organizations map the origin and spread of flu outbreaks.
"Our goal is to decrease the time required to identify new influenza virus infections and improve the way we monitor and respond to virus outbreaks, allowing public health measures to be quickly enacted, potentially saving thousands of lives," Dr. Rose said in the release.
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