Current Projects
Sequencing of the human genome has brought on tremendous advances in health care and the coming molecular revolution of medicine will see greatly improved patient care and outcomes. While exciting, these new diagnostics and therapies are often costly and can place financial burden on even well resourced health care systems. On a global scale, with two thirds of the world living on less than $2/day, most people cannot expect to benefit from these technologies. Research in the Pardee lab is dedicated to extending the reach of today’s advanced health care and is pioneered technologies to tackle the challenge of health care accessibility.
Portable diagnostics
As part of an international team, we recently demonstrated a portable and programmable system for the detection of disease with the development of molecular diagnostics for the Zika virus in just six weeks. These low cost tests (< $1) can detect the virus at clinically relevant concentrations directly from infected plasma without purification or concentration of the virus. These tools and others in development have the potential to provide diagnostic capabilities usually limited to well-resourced clinical labs to virtually anywhere. The Pardee lab is now leading a CIHR- and IDRC-funded patient and field trial of these low cost diagnostics in Latin America and has expanded use to other critical mosquito-borne infections .
Distributed drug manufacturing
Other efforts from the lab focus on improving access to fundamental therapeutics like vaccines, and new powerful antibody-based drugs. These therapeutics often require distribution with uninterrupted refrigeration and can be costly. Our group, along with collaborators, has begun to address this challenge by harnessing our freeze-dried cell-free system, which can be distributed at room temperature, to create an on-site, on-demand platform for manufacturing drugs. Proof-of-concept work demonstrated the manufacture of over 50 molecules, validating the bioactivity of many including animal studies that demonstrated the efficacy of vaccines produced with our portable manufacturing capability.
Portable diagnostics
As part of an international team, we recently demonstrated a portable and programmable system for the detection of disease with the development of molecular diagnostics for the Zika virus in just six weeks. These low cost tests (< $1) can detect the virus at clinically relevant concentrations directly from infected plasma without purification or concentration of the virus. These tools and others in development have the potential to provide diagnostic capabilities usually limited to well-resourced clinical labs to virtually anywhere. The Pardee lab is now leading a CIHR- and IDRC-funded patient and field trial of these low cost diagnostics in Latin America and has expanded use to other critical mosquito-borne infections .
Distributed drug manufacturing
Other efforts from the lab focus on improving access to fundamental therapeutics like vaccines, and new powerful antibody-based drugs. These therapeutics often require distribution with uninterrupted refrigeration and can be costly. Our group, along with collaborators, has begun to address this challenge by harnessing our freeze-dried cell-free system, which can be distributed at room temperature, to create an on-site, on-demand platform for manufacturing drugs. Proof-of-concept work demonstrated the manufacture of over 50 molecules, validating the bioactivity of many including animal studies that demonstrated the efficacy of vaccines produced with our portable manufacturing capability.
Our lab builds off the work performed by Dr. Pardee during his postdoctoral fellowship at The Wyss Institute in Boston, on the paper-based synthetic biology platform.
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