Why do we need this solution?

There is an urgent need to diagnose Urinary Tract Infections in a non-invasive manner. The prevailing complication of antibiotic resistance can affect patients negatively in the future. Our team had conducted a survey in four villages local to our institute, namely Lohadigam, Keluapalli, Kirtipur and Solabindho.

We found out the following details from this initiative - out of 40 people whom we surveyed, 11 people were using one bathroom in one household, while three people did not have a washroom in their house, prompting them to defecate openly.

In addition, people ignored the early symptoms of UTIs by mistakenly assuming them to be due to dehydration and were forced to suffer the consequences of chronic UTIs, in the form of kidney infections and sepsis. The incidence rates of kidney infections were very high during the month of April 2022.

We also reached out to Nidan, the Research and Diagnostic Lab in Brahmapur, Odisha to understand the prevalence of Urinary Tract Infections in the city. We have generated the data in the form of the following graph.

From this graph, we see the shocking occurrence of UTIs in children less than the age of 5. If ignored, the persistence of the biofilm formed during the infection can lead to chronic infections, sepsis, perinephric abscesses and even the formation of kidney stones in later stages of life. This made us realise that this solution was the need of the hour and prompted us to speed through our research and proceed towards developing a prototype with the utmost urgency.

Current diagnostic methods

The Current Diagnostic Methods for the detection of UTIs are the DipStick Tests and the Antibody-based tests. Although the DipStick Tests can detect whether the patient is infected or not, they do not have the capacity to identify the specific bacteria. Antibody-based tests, designed to determine which bacteria is primarily causing the infection, are highly unreliable due to its high-scale requirements like a cold chain and a laboratory set-up. They also take nearly 2-3 days to confirm the test results and have a high rate of false positives.

Our solution will be highly tuned for accurate detection of uropathogenic bacteria by repetitive testing with positive and negative controls. The advantages of aptamers over antibody-based diagnostic kits are highlighted in the tabular column below.