a lot of papers on a new point-of-care technique that has this beautiful sensitivity, and then it just ends. ‘Covid-19 and other infectious diseases point out this gap that needs to be addressed, from a funding perspective, if we are ever going to make effective, sensitive, cheap diagnostics that can be used globally,’ Garner said.
Beyond PCR: huge opportunities for optical tests In addition to challenges associated with the performance, relying mainly on one type of diagnostic test makes you vulnerable to supply issues, the panellists said, particularly with techniques that require several components. ‘We desperately need to develop new diagnostic methods that might replace PCR, to deal with future pandemics,’ said Dr Karin Nielson, a professor of paediatrics in the infectious diseases division at UCLA Children’s Hospital. Her team had been researching the neurodevelopment of children affected by the Zika virus in Brazil before the pandemic. They then switched to studying Covid-19 transmission between mothers and babies, and its effect on children over time.
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‘Not having diagnostic ability severely
prevented us from taking preventative measures. I do not trust the current numbers – they are clearly an under- representation,’ she said. ‘Everything is outsourced. It has
negatively impacted the pandemic and undermined everyone’s trust.’ UCLA Health’s Garner added that the
ideal test would be a point-of-care divide, in which only the target molecule needs to be changed. ‘But for that you need to sort out the funding issues,’ he said. In addition to diagnostics, photonics
has a huge potential in therapeutic development, which, until now, has been based on a largely trial-and-error approach. The University of Edinburgh’s Dhaliwal said doctors desperately need better tools to help them understand how infectious diseases progress inside the human body, for example with more advanced respiratory endoscopes. ‘We had to move to post- mortems to understand the lung. Better experimental interventional medicine is needed – getting photonics deep inside humans, where we can be at the site of disease activity, understand the players, deliver drugs locally, look at the local effect of photonic biomarkers.
CUSTOM
▪ Ruled and holographic reflection gratings
▪ Transmission gratings g
▪ Monochromators for wavelength selection
DIFFRACTION GRATINGS
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