A current focus in global health research is to make medical
tests that are not just cheap, but virtually free. One such strategy is to
start with paper – one of humanity’s oldest technologies – and build a device
like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other
diseases.
A University of Washington bioengineer recently developed a
way to make regular paper stick to medically interesting molecules. The work
produced a chemical trick to make paper-based diagnostics using plain paper,
the kind found at office supply stores around the world.