Rapid Near Point-of-Care Assay for Genotype Associated with Severe Hypersensitivity Reaction to Abacavir.

The nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor abacavir (ABC) is used commonly to treat young children with HIV infection and is a component of the fixed-dose-combination Triumeq. ABC can trigger a severe hypersensitivity reaction in people who are homozygous or heterozygous for . Testing for before ABC initiation is standard-of-care in high-resource settings, but current tests are costly or difficult to access in resource-limited settings.

Simpler and faster Covid-19 testing: Strategies to streamline SARS-CoV-2 molecular assays.

Background: Detection of SARS-CoV-2 infections is important for treatment, isolation of infected and exposed individuals, and contact tracing. RT-qPCR is the "gold-standard" method to sensitively detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA, but most laboratory-developed RT-qPCR assays involve complex steps. Here, we aimed to simplify RT-qPCR assays by streamlining reaction setup, eliminating RNA extraction, and proposing reduced-cost detection workflows that avoid the need for expensive qPCR instruments.

Multi-Channel Facial Photoplethysmography Sensing.

Motivated by the need for continuous cardiovascular monitoring, we present a system for performing photoplethysmography sensing at multiple facial locations. As a proof-of-concept, our system incorporates an optical sensor array into a wearable face mask form factor for application in a surgical hemodynamic monitoring use case. Here we demonstrate that our design can accurately detect pulse timing by validating estimated heart rate against ground truth electrocardiogram recordings.

Near point-of-care, point-mutation test to detect drug resistance in HIV-1: a validation study in a Mexican cohort.

Objective: Pretreatment HIV-drug resistance (PDR, HIVDR) to non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) is increasing globally. NNRTIs continue to be used as first-line antiretroviral therapy (ART) in some communities due to the cost of dolutegravir-based ART or dolutegravir-associated adverse events. A simplified version of the oligonucleotide ligation assay (OLA) - 'OLA-Simple' - is a low-cost, near point-of-care assay that provides ready-to-use lyophilized reagents and reports HIVDR mutations as colored lines on lateral flow strips.

OLA-Simple: A software-guided HIV-1 drug resistance test for low-resource laboratories.

Background: HIV drug resistance (HIVDR) testing can assist clinicians in selecting treatments. However, high complexity and cost of genotyping assays limit routine testing in settings where HIVDR prevalence has reached high levels.

Methods: The oligonucleotide ligation assay (OLA)-Simple kit was developed for detection of HIVDR against first-line non-nucleoside/nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and validated on 672 codons (168 specimens) from subtypes A, B, C, D, and AE.