With international HIV awareness day coming up in the not too distant future (1st December), I thought that this was definitely worth mentioning.
There has recently been a publication in the journal "Nature Nanotechnology" which describes a test where a protein changes the outcome of the chemical reaction - basically put, if it's there, the end product is blue, if it isn't, the end product is red. What the protein is though, can be changed. This has massive potential impact, because it allows doctors to test for small concentrations of, for example, cancer recurrence after surgery.
But more wide reaching than this is the potential to use it to test for low levels of HIV. It's far more effective than the existing methods because it is simple, but it's also very cheap, meaning that these can be used in remoter parts of Africa, where the previous technology was too expensive to use.
At the moment it is a working progress - the clinical trials needed to clear it haven't been done yet - but it is a very exciting idea, and one that could significantly impact the lives of millions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20084303
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.186.html
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