A Low-Cost Tuberculosis Diagnostic Test for Pregnant Women

Niaina Rakotosamimanana of the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar in Madagascar will develop a low-cost tuberculosis diagnostic and molecular test for pregnant women using dried blood samples drawn from finger pricks. This dried-blood spot based test is minimally invasive, can be used in remote areas where people lack access to all-weather roads and lack of infrastructure that has direct impact on health outcomes. The dried-blood spot can be sent via mail to the health centers for testing without established cold chain methods and meets several of the criteria set by the World Health Organization regarding quality of TB diagnostic tools. Dried-blood samples have a wide range of diagnostic capacity and have been shown to have advantages over other biological samples in terms of cost, ease of collection, transport, and storage.