Authors: Aubrey Russell, Ben Paepke, Nathan Goldfarb
Mentors: Nathan Goldfarb
Insitution: Utah Valley University
Tuberculosis (TB) remains an insidious scourge of civilization. The causative agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is a global health crisis, and TB ranks as the second leading cause of death from an infectious disease worldwide after COVID-19. In 2021, there were approximately 1.6 million deaths reported from TB (including 187,000 people with HIV) and an estimated 10.6 million new infections. Additionally, multidrug resistant TB remains a public health crisis. An initiative of “The Global Plan to End TB” is the development of rapid, point-of-care diagnostic assays for the early diagnosis of TB.2 Here we present our initial efforts towards the goal of the development of a rapid, lateral flow assay (LFA) for the detection of Mtb.