POLITICAL pressure has finally seen the price of antiretroviral therapy for HIV slashed in poorer countries. But a lack of cheap, simple diagnostics to enable doctors to use these complex treatments remains a stumbling block.
Now scientists from two New York universities believe they have the solution: a hand-held sensor that checks the health of a patient’s immune system in seconds. At the moment it can take a week to get the same results back from the lab, “and that’s if they don’t get lost”, says Glenda Gray, a consultant physician and head of perinatal HIV research at the University…
