For many years, researchers have been looking for fast, cheap methods for detecting diseases in the human body ongoing. Up until now, methods using foreign DNA have been a great help in their quest for a solution. Remco Verdoold, PhD student at UT, and his research group have now discovered a fast way of detecting tuberculosis. This represents a huge breakthrough in the field. Tuberculosis is particularly prevalent in the third world, where it prompts a highly infectious chain reaction.
“Thanks to our research, tuberculosis can now be detected very quickly”, explains Remco Verdoold. “It only takes one child in a class in Africa to be ill, and before you know it, the entire class is infected. Researchers have been exploring fast methods for detecting and controlling this disease, but the research was either not accurate enough or too expensive. This fast and innovative detection method will be highly beneficial to development aid work.”
Disease
Tuberculosis is an infectious disease caused by the TB bacillus. The bacteria are found in sputum (mucous) in the airways, and are released when people cough. “The first thing we need for an examination is sputum. In a lab, we then produce DNA that responds to tuberculosis DNA. This is also known as synthetic DNA.
Method
“We place a small ball of gold with tiny synthetic DNA hairs on a piece of glass. The gold balls are sixty nanometres, which is about five thousand times smaller than a hair. We chose them because they are easy to see with a microscope; the gold sparkles when we apply a certain type of light. The sparkling on the glass is usually seen as green through a microscope, but if tuberculosis is present, it becomes red. Although this is actually a fairly basic principle of physics, up until now very few people have been successful with the method. I think part of our success comes from looking not just at one ball of gold, but at thousands. This has allowed us to detect tuberculosis at a very early stage.”
Future
The findings have enabled the University of Twente to produce a sensor device that can in future be used for the fast detection of tuberculosis. Secure in this knowledge, the next few years must be spent carrying out experiments to optimize the method and device. Remco Verdoold thinks that it will be another ten years before the final product reaches the market. “We are already very proud of this first step. The method has been possible for fifty years according to the laws of physics, but it is so complex that nobody actually managed to isolate it. Using synthetic DNA was the real breakthrough. What’s more, the researchers at UT carried on testing long after other researchers had given up. That’s how we came to make this amazing discovery.”
More information
Remco Verdoold conducted in-depth research within the Nanobiophysics group, supervised by Rob Kooyman. The PhD ceremony will take place on 5 September at 12:45 hrs. in the Waaier building 4 on the University of Twente campus.
Nanobiophysics is a multidisciplinary research group operating at the interfaces of physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. They are an international team of enthusiastic, committed researchers, aspiring to top-level biophysics research. Nanobiophysics participates in the MESA + Institute for Nanotechnology and the MIRA Institute for Biotechnology and Technical Medicine.
