Advances in Nanotechnology and Microfluidics for Human Papillomavirus Diagnostics

Abstract

| Human papillomavirus (HPV) has been shown in many studies as a prerequisite for the development of cervical cancer, which is the second most common and predominant form of malignancy among women worldwide, with 270 000 deaths (80% of whom live in developing countries) and 500 000 new cases per year. Early diagnosis of cervical cancer allows patients to be fully treated. Therefore, there is high clinical utility of HPV diagnostics even with binary positive/ negative indication of the presence of HPV in patient samples.Although the Pap smear is widely used for cervical cancer screening, this method still suffers from low sensitivity and specificity. Thus, simple, rapid and inexpensive diagnostic methods are needed to detect the etiology of cervical cancer, i.e., HPV, especially high-risk oncogenic subtypes 16 and 18.Here, we review the existing assays and platforms employed for HPV diagnosis, and highlight recent advances in nanotechnology and microfluidics that potentially enable new approaches for HPV diagnosis.

Engineering long shelf life multi-layer biologically active surfaces on microfluidic devices for point of care applications

“…These preserved devices can be used for CD4 T cell counting at the point of need from a drop of unprocessed blood. The presented microfluidic device stabilization method is potentially widely applicable to other global health applications at resource-limited settings such as viral load, sepsis, tuberculosis, malaria, and cancer detection 9 16 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 . It would also have potential applications at the developed world settings such as at a primary care physician’s office or at home settings at the point of living.…”

Virus detection using nanosensors

“…Hence, there is an extreme clinical utility of diagnostics even with binary positive and negative indications. The Pap smear is generally used for screening, but this method still suffers from low sensitivity and specificity [82,83].…”

Advances in addressing technical challenges of point-of-care diagnostics in resource-limited settings

“…As recommended by the WHO Sexually Transmitted Diseases Diagnostics Initiative in 2004, rapid assays should be equipment-free for POC testing [14]. Nowadays, the concept of POC testing has gone beyond of the scope of rapid lateral flow assays, especially with the mainstream of developing molecular diagnostic devices with fast advances in microfluidics and nanotechnology [11,39]. The use of handheld, lightweight, battery-operated instruments is gradually becoming acceptable for performing molecular diagnosis with basic laboratory infrastructure.…”