Easy solutions that deliver results quickly are a great asset in medicine: patients receive their diagnosis faster and physicians have more time to treat them. Such tools also work without sophisticated resources and trained personal. A device currently developed in a project funded by the European Commission could bring all of this to point-of-care-testing for infectious diseases. Dr. Konstantinos Mitsakakis talks with MEDICA-tradefair.com about a disc-shaped point-of-care-test, how to shrink lab analyses to the size of a CD and what this will achieve for patients.Dr. Mitsakakis, we are talking about the LabDisk device developed in the EU project DiscoGnosis. Which problem does this device actually address?Dr. Konstantinos Mitsakakis: The device is a diagnostic tool to identify the causative agent of fever and guide the physician to the proper treatment. We do this by differentiating the genetic profile of the pathogen. Our panel includes malaria, dengue, salmonellosis and pneumonia. The panel can be expanded depending on the endemic/epidemic needs. For example, malaria causes fever, but there are also other infections that cause fever but have a different pathogenic origin: viruses or bacteria for example. So, these infections need different treatment. Physicians who only look at the clinical symptom of fever will come to wrong conclusions and choose the wrong treatment. This causes two main problems: patient mortality is higher under the wrong treatment. Furthermore, choosing general antimicrobial drugs instead of specific ones can lead to increased resistance in pathogens. ...
Read the whole interview with Dr. Mitsakakis at MEDICA-tradefair.com!