As the northern flu season approaches, virologists are again watching to see if H5N1 bird flu will begin to spread between people. Antiviral drugs might help contain it if we act really fast - yet current tests take days.
One major bottleneck is that the virus in a sputum sample has to be concentrated before its RNA can be amplified and compared with known H5N1 sequences. Now Jürgen Pipper and colleagues at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have used silica particles to bind viral RNA, which can then be concentrated within minutes using a magnet (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm1634).
This made the test nearly five times faster and up to 50 times cheaper than existing tests.
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