SCIENTISTS IN Dublin and Galway are developing a rapid meningitis test that could help save children’s lives.
The test will give a result within an hour, allowing doctors to confirm the disease quickly and then choose the best treatment.
Current tests take over eight hours, something that can delay treatment and put a child’s life at risk, said Prof Michael Berndt of Dublin City University.
“The aim is to develop a test that can sensitively detect within an hour whether a person has one of the three common bacteria that cause bacterial meningitis,” said Prof Berndt, who heads DCU’s biomedical diagnostics institute.
Minister of State for Science Conor Lenihan will this morning announce a €19 million research award for the institute provided by funding body Science Foundation Ireland. He will also officially open a new research centre that will house the institute.
The foundation’s award represents one of the largest single funding allocations yet given via its various programmes. It was the second major tranche of support for the institute, awarded after a rigorous international peer review process, Prof Berndt said.
The institute was established five years ago, one of the foundation’s centres for science, engineering and technology specialising in biomedical diagnostics. It is headed by DCU and includes university partners the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin and the Tyndall National Institute in Cork.
It also involves commercial partners including Ortho, Clinical Diagnostics, Analog Devices, Becton Dickinson, Millipore, Biosurfit and Alere. Together these will provide an additional €5 million in benefit in kind or cash in support of the institute, Prof Berndt said, bringing to €24 million the full value of today’s announcement.
“The mission of the [institute] is to develop point-of-care medical devices,” said Prof Berndt, who is also the professor of experimental medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons. These are devices used by clinicians in their offices or at the patient’s bedside.
The money will help bring scientific discoveries made by the institute into commercial use via the industrial partners. The rapid diagnostic test for meningitis would be one of the first to be developed through joint research involving the institute and teams at NUI Galway. The two centres are also working on a rapid test that can assess the effectiveness of breast cancer treatments.
The meningitis test comes directly from research done by the partners. “We already have the technology on the bench that can do that. We are reasonably confident we can achieve this but it may take up to two or three years,” Prof Berndt said.