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

出现不明原因发烧的儿童需要检查是否有细菌性尿路感染(UTI)，这可能涉及肾脏感染，或者可能导致永久性肾脏损害的急性肾盂肾炎(APN)。目前的测试包括昂贵而漫长的尿路感染培养，这需要几天时间，对于没有上厕所训练的幼儿来说很容易受到污染，以及使用放射性示踪剂进行肾脏成像，这种示踪剂昂贵、复杂，并使儿童暴露在致癌辐射中。*这项提议建立在申请人的麦吉尔大学实验室与SensoReal和Parallex生物检测公司现有合作努力的基础上，开发诊断微流控芯片，直接检测尿液中的多种细菌病原体，并测量APN的血液蛋白质生物标记物。这种基于微芯片的快速、灵敏、低成本和微创的诊断设备将允许对UTI和APN进行常规检测，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，而不需要昂贵和漫长的尿液培养，也不需要基于放射性同位素的侵入性肾脏扫描。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生物分析公司的产品开发。*

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.****