During the four years of my undergraduate education, I was fortunate to be exposed to various different areas in the field of biology. These were molecular biology, systems biology, structural biology, bioinformatics, biochemistry, biomaterials & tissue engineering, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, ethology, neurobiology, biomedical instrumentation, biomechanics, biomedical signal and image processing. Some of the areas which I find appealing are biochemistry, ethology, neurobiology, biomedical instrumentation and biomechanics. In particular, getting to know about and working at the confluence of different disciplines has been a pleasurable experience.
But, given an opportunity to identify one area, I will choose the area of designing point of care diagnostics – cheap, non-invasive, quick and sensitive so that they are accessible to the common man. Most of the villages in our country do not have pathology facilities; even if they exist they are far-off or are very expensive. One example where this is showing positive results is the pregnancy testing kit – no need of going to pathology, even the patients can use it on their own; all they have to do is to pour the urine sample and wait for 5 minutes to check the color. However, these on-the-spot assays have not been commercialized for blood-glucose level, WBC/TLC count, malarial parasite detection; stool and urine sample analysis.
One unsolved problem in this area is to design a cheap, easy-to-use assay system for diagnosing malaria; the current state of affairs is that diagnosis is symptomatic/ one needs to have a reasonably well-equipped pathology facility so as to just diagnose the disease. With the recent advancements in BioMEMS(which have led to ELISA, microPCR etc.), the task seems possible. Using immobilized marker molecules, immunochromatography or may be detecting a simple change in physical property (pH, viscosity, optical/electrical/thermal/mechanical properties) can be a solution. The ultimate dream is to make these tests as simple and cheap as using a thermometer.
