Needle-Free Transdermal Malaria Diagnosis

The need for sophisticated blood testing for diagnosis has hampered efforts to control malaria. However, all blood-stage malaria parasites produce nanocrystals of a unique compound — hemozoin — as they digest hemoglobin, and researchers have now developed a technique that appears to be able to detect these nanoparticles transdermally.

Hemozoin has high optical absorbance, and the heat generated when hemozoin nanocrystals are exposed to a picosecond pulse from a near-infrared laser evaporates liquid around them, producing transient vapor nanobubbles (VNBs). The explosive generation and subsequent collapse of these VNBs generate characteristic optical and acoustic signals, and researchers were able to define these signals in studies of isolate…