You May Soon Be Able to Test for HIV with This USB Stick

It appears everyone may soon be able to test for HIV using just a specially made USB stick and a computer. A group of researchers from Imperial College London and DNA electronics have just developed a USB stick that takes a drop of blood to detect HIV in about 30 minutes.

At the moment, a regular HIV test takes up to thirty days and requires taking a blood sample to a laboratory, but this new device is set to eliminate this.
Using just a drop of blood for the HIV test, the pH level detected is converted to an electric signal that can be read by a computer or handheld device to give results. It doesn’t just determine the presence of the virus, it also measures the level of the virus in the blood stream to let patients monitor their own treatment.

Although the HIV-monitoring USB stick is still under development, this research has already been published in the scientific reports journal, and tests show that it gives accurate results. Dr Graham Cooke, senior author of the research from the Department of Medicine at Imperial said:

HIV treatment has dramatically improved over the last 20 years – to the point that many diagnosed with the infection now have a normal life expectancy.
However, monitoring viral load is crucial to the success of HIV treatment. At the moment, testing often requires costly and complex equipment that can take a couple of days to produce a result. We have taken the job done by this equipment, which is the size of a large photocopier, and shrunk it down to a USB chip.

It’s unclear when this new technology would become publicly available, but you can read the full report here.