Rapid diagnostic chips for detection and determination of the severity of urinary tract infection

出现不明原因发热的儿童需要检查细菌性尿路感染（UTI），这可能涉及肾脏感染或急性肾盂肾炎（APN），这可能导致永久性肾脏损伤。目前的测试涉及昂贵和漫长的尿培养尿路感染，这需要几天，很容易污染的幼儿，没有受过专业训练，肾成像与放射性示踪剂，这是昂贵的，复杂的，并暴露于致癌辐射儿童。该提案建立在麦吉尔大学申请人实验室与Sensoreal和Parallex BioAssays之间的现有合作努力的基础上，以开发诊断微流体芯片，直接检测尿液中的多种细菌病原体并测量APN的血液蛋白生物标志物。这种基于微芯片的、快速、灵敏、低成本和微创的诊断装置将允许对UTI和APN进行常规测试，确定严重程度，从而提供高质量的诊断以指导临床决策和治疗，而不需要昂贵和冗长的尿培养，也不需要基于侵入性放射性同位素的肾扫描。这项创新的临床诊断技术将影响加拿大的医疗保健，并加速Sensoreal和Parallex BioAssays的产品开发。

Children presenting a fever without known sources need to be checked for bacterial urinary tract infection (UTI), which may involve infection in the kidneys, or acute pyelonephritis (APN), that can result in permanent kidney damage. Current tests involve costly and lengthy urine culturing for UTI which requires several days and is prone to contamination for young children that are not toilet-trained, and renal imaging with a radioactive tracer which is costly, complicated, and exposes children to carcinogenic radiation.****This proposal builds on an existing collaborative effort between the applicant's lab at McGill University with Sensoreal and Parallex BioAssays to develop diagnostic microfluidic chips that directly detect multiple bacterial pathogens in urine and measure blood protein biomarkers for APN. This microchip-based, rapid, sensitive, low-cost and minimally invasive diagnostic device would allow routine testing for UTI and APN, determination of the severity, thus providing high quality diagnosis to guide clinical decision and treatments without the need for neither expensive and lengthy urine culturing nor invasive radioisotope-based renal scanning. This innovative clinical diagnostic technology will impact the Canadian healthcare and accelerate Sensoreal and Parallex BioAssays's product development.****