Advancing point-of-care diagnostics with an ancient process

This is a brief preview of the full article, which can be found on Nature’s website.

With infectious diseases, time is of the essence. Doctors can more easily treat and prevent the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis, Ebola and COVID-19 when they can rapidly and accurately identify new infections. But testing often requires bulky machinery, specialized training and significant capital—all of which can be difficult to find outside of centralized laboratories. Every moment a sample spends in transit, or in a queue at a laboratory, the ability to respond to infectious diseases diminishes.

As molecular diagnostics have developed—most of which rely upon compounds or enzymes suspended in liquid—researchers have been exploring ways to overcome the challenges associated with point-of-care diagnostics. That work did not lead them to a new technique, but an ancient one: freeze-drying, known technically as lyophilization.

Read the full article to at Nature’s Website