Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have spent the last two years working on the chip that can identify strains of human flu, strains of bird flu, and influenza viruses that contain elements of both -- the organisms doctors fear could start a pandemic, said Kathy Rowlen, professor of chemistry, and Robert Kuchta, professor of biochemistry.

"If you have the flu, you want to know right away what kind it is," Kuchta told United Press International. "If it's the kind we normally get in the winter, you can just go home and take aspirin. If it's a lethal strain you need to start Tamiflu or Relenza right away to reduce the toxicity, make your will just in case, and go into quarantine.

"Being able to identify the type of virus means the best outcome for you and your community, since health officials can start the containment process as soon as possible," he said.

Rowlen told UPI that the chips are about a hundredth of an inch long and contain bits of DNA from a number of flu strains. The chip is placed on a microscope slide, and the slide is dipped in a solution made from broken-down nasal cells from an infected individual plus fluorescent dye.

Since DNA and RNA are intertwined in the nucleus of our cells, when RNA from the viruses in the nasal cells finds a DNA match, it bonds to it like a key in a lock. That part of the chip "lights up" and the virus can be identified.

The chips use parts of viral DNA that don't change much and parts that change very rapidly as viruses mutate, so the chances of determining whether the virus is influenza and identifying the specific strain are optimized, the researchers said.

If the virus is a new strain, more tests can be run to explore its characteristics, they said.

In addition to naturally occurring organisms, Rowlen said the chip could also likely be used to identify viruses that are engineered by terrorists.

Kuchta told UPI that that figure was "on the borderline of being useful in a pandemic, although it is eight to nine times faster than current culture methods that take four to five days."

Currently, the chip takes 11 hours to identify an organism, but the researchers say they are trying to improve the technology so the test takes only one to two hours and can be run from a handheld device the size of a cell phone.

This would allow public health workers to run the test in remote areas of developing nations on either humans or large flocks of agricultural birds. The team is also reconfiguring the chip so it can be used for global surveillance of RNA viruses, including SARS, measles, HIV and hepatitis C, and are trying to include a test element that would determine whether or not the virus is drug resistant.

The Centers for Disease Control evaluated the chip for three primary subtypes of flu in October and found it more than 90 percent accurate, the researchers noted.

A second trial testing the chip's speed and accuracy against standard flu-virus culturing methods will be conducted in December.

Diane Griffin, chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said she thought the new chip was moving things in the right direction.

"A variety of microchips are being developed for different organisms," Griffin told UPI. "Having one for influenza would be terrific. Even if it were only available in labs or hospitals or the CDC it would help us, but I think the researchers should be able to create a short test in a handheld device with the technology that's available," she said. "Right now it doesn't matter much, but if there's a pandemic, it will matter a great deal."

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