Rotating-crystal Malaria Diagnosis: Pre-clinical validation

Abstract

Improving the efficiency of malaria diagnosis is one of the main goals of current malaria research. We have recently developed a magneto-optical (MO) method which allows high-sensitivity detection of malaria pigment (hemozoin) crystals via their magnetically induced rotation in blood. Here, we validate this technique on laboratory derived blood samples infected with \textit{Plasmodium falciparum}. Using two parasite cultures, the first containing mostly ring stages and the second corresponding to the end of the parasite life cycle, we demonstrate that our novel method can detect parasite densities as low as \(\sim\)40 and \(\sim\)10\,parasites per microliter of blood for ring and schizont stage parasites, respectively. This detection limit exceeds the performance of rapid diagnostic tests and competes with the threshold achievable by light microscopic observation of blood smears. Our method can be performed with as little as 50\,microliter of capillary blood and is sensitive to the presence of hemozoin micro-crystals down to ppm concentrations. The device, designed to a portable format for clinical and in-field tests, requires no special training of the operator or specific reagents, except for an inexpensive lysis solution to release intracellular hemozoin. Beyond diagnostics, this technique may offer an efficient tool to study hemozoin formation, trace hemozoin kinetics in the body and test susceptibility/resistance of parasites to new antimalarial drugs inhibiting hemozoin formation.