Early Health Technology Assessment of Non-sputum-based Assays for Screening and Treatment Monitoring in a prospective cohort of pulmonary tuberculosis
End : 30 June 2024
Early Health Technology Assessment of Non-sputum-based Assays for Screening and Treatment Monitoring in a prospective cohort of pulmonary tuberculosis
About Project
Tuberculosis is caused by bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It is a significant problem in Thailand as seen that in 2021 Thailand is in the World Health Organization’s list of 30 high-burden countries for tuberculosis. One of the problems about tuberculosis is inaccurate diagnosis due to insufficient sensitivity and specificity of primary routine diagnostic tests including sputum smear microscopy (SSM) and chest radiography. Moreover, collecting sputum for SSM in adults and especially children is quite a challenge because sputum stays deep in the throat and difficult to collect. Children do not have skills or abilities to provide sputum sample, thus an extensive and costly medical procedure such as using anesthetics sometimes has to be performed to collect sputum in children. Delay in diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis can thwart the WHO goal of eliminating tuberculosis by 2035.
Therefore, the translational research team had an objective to replace SSM by proposing a non-sputum-based assay with higher sensitivity and specificity that can be used in lower-resource settings in Thailand. Innovation from MOTIP research team involves loop-medicated isothermal amplification (LAMP)-based assay with chromatographic visualization on a lateral flow dipstick (LFD). The Early HTA of the non-sputum-based assay for screening and treatment monitoring of tuberculosis will help provide the necessary information to be helpful for developing the new screening and treatment monitoring tool for tuberculosis. The next section will elaborate the objectives of the early HTA of the non-sputum-based assay for tuberculosis.
This project is supported by the Mahidol-Oxford Translational Innovation Partnership.
Research Team
Related Organizations/
Supporting Organizations
