Origami test for rapid hepatitis C screening

Affecting an estimated 70 million people around the world, hepatitis C is a bloodborne virus that damages the liver. While treatable, it can often go undetected until significant harm has occurred, resulting in diseases such as cirrhosis or cancer. Around 400,000 people die each year from complications associated with hep C.

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The new test builds on previous work done by the Glasgow team where they used origami techniques to develop a rapid test for malaria that was trialled in Uganda. It uses sheets of origami-like folded wax paper to prepare samples for a process known as loop-mediated isothermal amplification, or LAMP.

Paper folding enables the sample to be processed and delivered to three small chambers in a cartridge, which the LAMP machine heats and uses to test the samples for the presence of hepatitis C RNA. According to the researchers, the technique is sufficiently simple that in the future it could be delivered from a blood sample taken from a patient via a finger prick. The work is set to be published in Nature Communications.