Dec. 09, 2005 - 20:12 MST

HOPEFUL

An article by Bill Scanlon of the Rocky Mountain News in the paper this morning gives encouragement to folks trying to keep up with disease and diagnosis. Quoted here in part:

Device shortens time of disease detection from 4 days to 11 hours

"Suddenly this autumn, University of Colorado researchers had a hot property on their hands -- the type of invention that could earn millions of dollars and someday save thousands thousands of lives."

"It was the flu chip, a wafer-thin device that can determine in 11 hours rather than four days, whether someone has an infectious disease, and what strain it is."

"After a year and a half of stumbling along on their $2 million National Instututes of Health grant, the CU researchers started getting remarkable accuracy with their chip in September and October."

"Had they followed protocol, the researchers would have written a paper about the chip, gotten it published in a journal, gotten reactions, found a private company willing to bring it to market then started eqrning royalty payments to divide among the researchers, their departments and CU as a whole."

"Instead, principal investigator Kathy Rowlen and co-principal investigator Robert Kuchta, with the support of CU, announced they were making their intellectual property available for free to the world's health agencies."

"In doing so, they may have walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars in early royalties, but the chance of saving lives by releasing the information early was worth it to them."

"HEAD START IN PANDEMIC FIGHT"

"Imagine if you're a health official in Southeast Asia and all of a sudeden four or five people in the same town get the symptoms of bird flu," Kuchta said."

"That's a vry strong indication that bird flu has learned how to travel from human to human. It may be the start of a world wide pandemic."

"You'd want to take some severe precautions: quarantine the people, stop tourism, vaccinate people, kill millions of wild and domestic birds."

But right now it takes four days to identify the strain of flu -- TIME ENOUGH FOR THE DISEASE TO SPREAD ACROSS THE WORLD."

"This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention performed tests on the chips and got the same or better accuracy than CU."

"By spring, demand for the Generation One chip, as it is called, could hit 30,000 from agencies such as the World Health Organization and Southeast Asian health ministries, Kutcha estimated."

"If the chip proves successful there, millions might be produced to quickly detect not only different infuenza viruses but anthrax and a host of other pathogens, he said.

"Rowlen and Kutchta, along with a few post-doctoral and graduate students and one undergraduate, have been carving a niche for themselves in the field of microarrays."

"A microarray, according to MedineNet.com, is a tool that sifts through and analyzes information contained within a genome."

"The researchers wanted to see if microarrays could screen for several types of viruses and pathogens at the same time."

"The Rowlan-Kutchta team used a robot to carefully position dozens of micron-sized splotches of DNA onto a microscope slide. Then they immersed the slide in a solution from saliva or a nasal sample from the sick human or bird."

"By heating and then slowly cooling the sample, information emerges. DNA fragments from the microarray bind to a virus' RNA like a key in a lock."

"The captured RNA, containing a flourescent dye from the wash solution, lights up like a pinball machine when the chip is inserted in a laser scanner."

"A particular strain of virus finds jut the one DNA match from among the dozens of samples on the slide, and only that one lights up brightly."

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One of the great dangers in our society of today is the rapid transmission of disease by people traveling by air from country and continent to other countries of the world.

Perhaps this will help nip transmission of diseases in the bud. Hopefully it will be put to good use.

Other headlines and articles in the paper are of the same old stuff, just different names and crimes or mangled accident victims, political razz-ma-tazz, ah well, we most of us, read the papers and are used to that.

This article was back in mid paper as if it weren't all that important, like many items of good news usually end up. In this matter I am extremely HOPEFUL . . . . . . . . . . .

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