Impedance-based detection of Schistosoma mansoni larvae viability for drug screening

Human schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by trematodes, affecting almost 250 million people worldwide. For the past 30 years, treatment has relied on the large-scale administration of praziquantel. However, concerns regarding the appearance of drug-resistance parasites require ef...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2017 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS) Vol. 2017; pp. 1 - 4
Main Authors Modena, Mario M., Chawla, Ketki, Lombardo, Flavio, Burgel, Sebastian C., Panic, Gordana, Keiser, Jennifer, Hierlemann, Andreas
Format Conference Proceeding Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States IEEE 01.10.2017
Subjects
drug screening
Drugs
Electrodes
Fluctuations
impedance analysis
Microfluidics
Schistosoma mansoni
schistosomiasis
Semiconductor device measurement
Visualization
Schistosoma mansoni
impedance analysis
schistosomiasis
drug screening
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Summary:Human schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by trematodes, affecting almost 250 million people worldwide. For the past 30 years, treatment has relied on the large-scale administration of praziquantel. However, concerns regarding the appearance of drug-resistance parasites require efforts in identifying novel classes of suitable drugs against schistosomiasis. The current drug screening system is manual, slow and subjective. We present here a microfluidic platform capable of detecting changes in viability of Schistosoma mansoni larvae (Newly Transformed Schistosomula, NTS). This platform could serve as a pre-screening tool for the identification of drug candidates. It is composed of a pair of coplanar electrodes integrated in a microfluidic channel for the detection and quantification of NTS motility. Comparison of viability detection by using our platform with the standard visual evaluation shows that our method is able to reliably detect viable and non-viable NTS at high sensitivity, also in case of low-motility parasites, while enabling a 10 fold decrease in sample consumption.
DOI:10.1109/BIOCAS.2017.8325227