Today, biological materials like blood, tissues and organs are representing a daily routine material that hospitals and research institutes are dealing with for many preventive, therapeutic and research applications. They represent the hope for many medical situations but at the same time they pose a risk of transmitting diseases via blood transfusion, tissue transplantation or organ transplantation.
Thus, there is an urgent need to improve the technologies used for screening diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. The same need exists to test donor blood in a cheap and fast way, especially in less developed countries where the rate of infected blood is high due to high prevalence of diseases.
RaSP intends to develop a very fast, cheap and at the same time very sensitive method which has the potential to detect more than 100 blood pathogens simultaneously. RaSP aims at simultaneously detecting the pathogens HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B and syphilis to demonstrate the capabilities of the system.
A simple and small desktop system which is easy to use and which leads to accurate results will be set up allowing to detect the presence of any of the mentioned blood pathogens within 10-20 minutes. Thus, infected blood could be excluded at an early stage from the blood banking procedure.
RaSP exploits a new type of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) transducing principle that allows very fast and sensitive testing. The immunosensing diagnostic assay is based on the very specific immune reaction between antigens and antibodies.
The resulting diagnostic system would represent a revolution in the field of rapid diagnostics and its applications in the medical sector would reduce the risk of dealing with contaminated biological materials and would help to prevent persons from becoming severely ill.
To achieve these objectives RaSP incorporates the interdisciplinary know-how of three research institutes, three university departments and three companies located in Europe, associated states and international cooperation countries.
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