“Bold innovation” to develop bronchitis test strip wins Grand Challenges Canada award

gcclogoA project to develop a simple test strip to measure bronchitis in patients with asthma and COPD has been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Grand Challenges Canada’s global health care program.

Dr. Parameswaran Nair, an AllerGen investigator and the CIHR Canada Research Chair in Airway Inflammometry at McMaster University, has developed the test, which measures the quantity of eosinophil peroxidase (EPX), a protein that can be detected in sputum.

Dr. John Brennan, a Canada Research Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry and the Director of McMaster University’s BioInterfaces Institute, is helping Dr. Nair transform the technology into a simple, paper-based strip by using novel “bio-inks.” The bioactive paper would offer an inexpensive, diagnostic test for infectious and allergic bronchitis that could be performed at home or in a doctor’s office.

“This frugal innovation, we hope will change the way airway diseases are managed globally, both in resource-poor and resource-high countries, and in both children and adults,” Dr. Nair explains in his online video about the project. He continues this work as a legacy to the late Dr. Freddy Hargreave who pioneered the use of sputum cell counts at the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health (Hamilton, Ontario) to treat patients with severe airway diseases. In the next phase of this research, Dr. Nair and Dr. Brennan plan to use the strip to study the treatment of bronchitis in India.

The project was one of 83 “creative, out-of-the-box ideas” selected for recognition from among 451 applications to Grand Challenges Canada—a federal agency dedicated to supporting bold ideas with big impact in global health. The award was announced November 21, 2013, and featured in The Hamilton Spectator and GlobalNews.

Development of the biosensor test strip is also supported by funding from a CIHR -NSERC grant through the Collaborative Health Research Program. Dr. Nair’s research program is supported by AllerGen NCE.