Just a few days ago I attended a free conference hosted by the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases at UC Berkeley. At the conference, attendees discussed ways to diagnose and treat emerging and neglected diseases – diseases that are on the rise or which research has left behind. At the conference I learned about one particularly huge problem in this field and about a ton of new research that gives me hope for the future.
What needs to change in emerging and neglected diseases: investment in diagnostics and antibiotics
You cannot effectively treat a sick person if you don’t what’s causing their sickness. This seems obvious but believe it or not we’re lagging behind in our ability to diagnose a number of diseases. For example, as I learned at the conference (and later fact checked on the WHO website), only 20% of the millions of cases of Hepatitis C were diagnosed in 2015. Being that Hepatitis C can have rather dangerous health effects including cirrhosis and liver cancer, this is clearly a problem.
Unfortunately, as new diagnostic tools will have some of their biggest impacts in poorer regions, they must be inexpensive. This means investors have less monetary incentive to back their development. There’s a similar problem in the world of antibiotics research. Despite the fact that antibiotic resistant bacteria are on the rise, new antibiotics won’t generate as much revenue as other drugs. Thus new antibiotics research won’t get funded until antibiotic resistance gets worse, demand for new antibiotics goes up, and prices increase.
The solution as discussed at the conference is to find ways to decouple the high costs of the diagnostic/antibiotic clinical development process from the cost of the final product. From what I could tell, this will require more philanthropic organizations, NGOs, and governments to grant more money to clinical development in these fields. For example, one awesome nonprofit at the conference, FIND, works to provide resources, funding connections, and research infrastructure to those developing diagnostics. We need more organizations like FIND and, in the absence of government support, donors who will fund this research.
Cool advances in diagnostics and antibiotics research
Despite the need to fix the funding environment, there are a lot of cool developments in diagnostics and antibiotica research! Here’s a smattering of things I learned about at the conference:
- Tiny turkey basters for detecting disease – Pinpoint Science is a startup creating tools for diagnosing disease. They’ve developed a device that uses nanopipettes (basically teeny tiny turkey basters) to detect disease compounds (think toxins and parts of viruses). When biological materials in the nanopipettes attach to disease compounds, they cause changes in electrical signals that tell users the disease is present. Pinpoint believes that it can provide these devices at incredibly low prices (in the $1 range) and use them to diagnose all sorts of diseases.
- Cell phone microscopes – Aydogan Ozcan from UCLA is working to develop cell phone attachments that turn your phone into a mobile microscope. These can be produced at much lower prices than standard microscopes. Thus they’ll make it easier for researchers all over the world to analyze biological samples. I imagine these could be great for people in the DIY Bio space as well.
- Developing new antibiotics with a little help from out gut bacteria – Believe it or not, the “good” bacteria living in your gut defend you against disease-causing invaders. Indeed, these gut bacteria produce compounds that kill the invaders. Manuela Raffatellu from UCSD is studying these compounds. She hopes to use what she learns to create the next generation of antibiotics. I’m absolutely fascinated by this work and will hopefully write a separate blog post on it soon.
This is just a smattering of the research going on in the world of diagnostics and antibiotics. Researchers are coming up with many creative ways to diagnose and treat emerging and neglected diseases. We just need to fund them better!