For most diseases, early detection leads to better patient outcomes.
That’s why infectious disease experts and chemists at the UCF College of Medicine and College of Sciences were recently awarded a $537,619 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a low cost, accurate test that detects Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C and HIV at the same time.
The researchers are working to repurpose an existing electrochemical biosensor and apply that technology to quickly identify the viruses at the RNA level and quantify viral loads in resource-limited settings.
There is a worldwide need for such a test, as more than 300 million people live with the two forms of hepatitis and more than 40 million live with HIV, World Health Organization data shows. Access to faster and easy-to-use testing can reduce the spread of both viruses and help patients catch hepatitis earlier, reducing their risks of developing liver failure, cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Simultaneous testing also has potential to remove barriers to patient care and help doctors better refine treatment plans.
“It’s very important to detect those viruses in the same sample because those viruses share the same route of transmission and it increases the chance that the same person may get multiple viruses,” says Yulia Gerasimova, an associate professor of chemistry working on this project. to know how to tailor the treatment for patients depending on if they have a co-infection or not.”
Quicker Results, Healthier Patients
Current diagnostics for both viruses require a blood test and analysis by a clinic or hospital lab. For that reason, testing is difficult in remote and resource-limited areas of the world, where getting results can take months.
During that time, undiagnosed patients get sicker and the disease may spread.
“I think the goal is to have something that’s accessible worldwide — regardless of the environment,” says College of Medicine researcher Daniel Ram, an assistant professor of infectious disease who is working on the project. “Having the capacity to detect multiple viruses at once really has potential to benefit everyone.”
Ram recalls growing up in Guyana where his mother was the director of a national clinic that could not process such patient samples on site.
“In order to quantify viruses and patient samples, we would have to ship the samples out to Miami or sometimes Trinidad and Tobago,” he says. “During shipping, those samples degraded and the possibility for failure is high. In the meantime, doctors didn’t know how to best treat the patients.”
The researchers hope to reshape patient care by creating a more accessible and affordable diagnostic that can be used at low resource settings, says Karin Chumbimuni-Torres associate professor of chemistry and project lead.
The Science Behind New Tests
Instead of the current blood test that measures the body’s immune response to each virus and the distinct viral load of each virus, the UCF researchers want to repurpose an existing electrochemical biosensor and apply that technology to quickly identify both viruses at the RNA level. They envision that collected samples, such as blood, can be screened with the sensor.
Chumbimuni-Torres developed similar technology to detect dengue fever and the Zika virus, and her preliminary positive results allowed her to receive the NIH grant for hepatitis and HIV.
The HIV virus often mutates so the UCF scientists programed their sensor to detect any strain of the disease.
“This is key,” Chumbimuni-Torres says. “HIV can mutate a lot so we made a technique that can detect any of the mutations.”
Because the biosensors conduct genetic testing on the viruses, the scientists can target all the different genetic sequences of both viruses.
“We want to quantify the virus so doctors can know how to treat patients,” Chumbimuni-Torres says.
Through this research, the team hopes to develop the technology that would work regardless of the source of viral genomes, Gerasimova says.
“We’re using something called isothermal amplification to amplify viral nucleic acids for them to be detected with virus-specific probes,” she says. “This project is more or less exploratory and we’re developing and fine tuning our technique along the way.”
“We want to be test whether or not the sensors can detect certain amounts of virus and how that would relate to how that may manifest in patients,” he says. “For this round of experimentation, we need to validate with cell cultures and having different quantified amounts of the viruses. Knowing how many viral particles it’s able to detect will allow us to move forward in assessing a patient cohort.”
As their research progresses, Ram says he sees the potential for the test to greatly improve the lives of patients worldwide
“This technology has immediate benefit if we can show it to work effectively in detecting multiple viruses,” he says.
Researchers’ Credentials:
Chumbimuni-Torres is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at UCF. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. After graduating, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University and the University of California, San Diego. During that time, she also worked at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Before joining UCF, she served as a research associate at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research interests focus on understanding, characterizing and developing chemical sensors for biological applications such as analyzing microRNAs, RNA and DNA. Her group is also interested in studying the interactions at the interface of biomolecules and nanomaterials.
Gerasimova is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, where she leads the Nucleic Acid Function and Diagnostics Laboratory. She earned her doctoral degree in bioorganic chemistry from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Russia. Gerasimova joined UCF in 2010 as a postdoctoral researcher and transitioned to a faculty role in Fall 2016.
Ram is an assistant professor of medicine at UCF’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. His lab studies the role of infection and disease on the modulation of splicing, leading to dysfunctional immune responses. Ram earned his doctoral degree in immunology at Tufts University in 2016, then trained as a postdoctoral research fellow for four years at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He subsequently served as an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School prior to joining UCF in 2023.
