As public health officials grapple with the enormous health crisis of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and most recently Congo, it raises the question of whether mobile health could make a difference. An Information Week article drew attention to some examples where mobile health tools could offer a way to trace the disease’s spread and diagnose it.
Access to mobile technology is growing fast: One advantage for the potential of mobile health in African countries is that Africa has had a rapidly growing number of mobile subscribers in the past decade. Mobile phone users are expected to reach 1 billion by 2015.
Traceability: Geo-referenced, real-time maps of infected patients could be key to tracking and controlling the spread of the virus. By providing epidemiologists data on positive diagnoses, confirmed vectors, they could serve as especially useful planning tools.
Smartphone diagnostic devices would be an enormous help in this public health emergency. After all, providing greater access to medical testing for underserved communities is why many healthcare startups like Biomeme got started in the first place.
In a short interview with MedCity News, Biomeme Co-founder Max Perelman said Biomeme been asked whether it’s developing an Ebola diagnostic by quite a few people. He said they’re exploring it. But he also points out that the development of such an assay comes with some critical challenges. On the one hand, its thermocycler can detect a DNA or RNA signature in the assay, so that’s a positive. But is refrigeration required for the test? That can be a problem for communities that lack the kind of access to electricity that most Americans take for granted. Although certain assays it uses are “self stable” because they have gone through a freeze-drying process (lyophilization), a blood-based test would probably require certain lab protocols that just aren’t available in the affected communities.
Some of these considerations inform the design of Biomeme’s smartphone diagnostic tool. It runs on batteries, and it has intuitive software. “It’s exactly why we developed our system,” Perelman said.
The grim reality is that a smartphone diagnostic assay probably won’t be ready within the six month time frame Medecins Sans Frontiers predicts it will take to get the disease under control. But it highlights the need for these devices to be ready when there is a crisis. That could trigger or even accelerate investment and development in smartphone diagnostic devices so they could be rapidly deployed in the future.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Earlier this month the FDA fast-tracked an Ebola diagnostic test for approval for individuals with symptoms of Ebola, those deemed to be at risk for exposure or who may have already been exposed. One complexity of the disease is it can take up to 21 days for symptoms to appear after infections. The DoD EZ1 Real-time RT-PCR Assay was authorized for overseas use by military personnel, aid workers and emergency responders in labs designated by the Department of Defense to respond to the Ebola outbreak.
