Strains of Malaria Identified on a Chip

Very cool (medGadget via Instapundit) - especially for one of the biggest killers in the developing world:

Currently, it can take anything up to 48 hours to determine whether a patient has Malaria and even then, doctors are unable to tell whether the parasite is drug resistant. In certain cases, a malaria diagnosis has to be confirmed by DNA amplification which can take another one to two days. The only current way to test for drug resistance is to give patients certain drugs and wait to see if they work.

Our Malaria chip should be able to do the whole process in less than 60 minutes, and we hope that by the end of our development project we will have reduced this time further.