Affiliation:
1. Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam- 781039, India
Abstract
Background:
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are communicable diseases caused by a
group of bacteria, viruses, protozoa and helminths prevalent in more than 145 countries that affect the
world’s poverty stricken populations. WHO enlists 18 NTDs amongst people living in endemic areas
having inaccessibility to preventive measures. Steps to reduce the global disease burden of the NTDs
need attention at multi-factorial levels. Control programmes, mass drug administrations, transmission
checks, eradication surveillances and diagnoses are some of them. The foremost in this list is confirmatory
diagnosis. A comprehensive summary of the innovative, high-impact, multiplexed, low-cost diagnostic
tools developed in the last decade that helped to meet the needs of users can depict a holistic approach
to further evaluate potential technologies and reagents currently in research.
Major Advancements:
A literature survey based on developing nano-biotechnological platforms to meet
the diagnostic challenges in NTDs towards development of a useful point-of-care (POC) unit is reported.
However, in order to pave the way for complete eradication more sensitive tools are required that are
user-friendly and applicable for use in endemic and low-resource settings. There are various novel research
progresses/advancements made for qualitative and quantitative measurement of infectious load in
some diseases like dengue, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis; though further improvements on the
specificity and sensitivity front are still awaited. Strategies to combat the problem of antimicrobial drug
resistance in diagnosis of NTDs have also been put forward by various research groups and organizations.
Moreover, the state-of-the-art “omics” approaches like metabolomics and metagenomics have also
started to contribute constructively towards diagnosis and prevention of the NTDs.
Conclusion:
A concrete solution towards a single specimen based common biomarker detection platform
for NTDs is lacking. Identifying robust biomarkers and implementing them on simple diagnostic
tools to ease the process of pathogen detection can help us understand the obstacles in current diagnostic
measures of the NTDs.
Publisher
Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.
Subject
Drug Discovery,General Medicine
Cited by
8 articles.
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