According to the WHO, approximately 38 million people across the globe are living with HIV/AIDS. Strict adherence to Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) is critical to determine treatment success and to decrease morbidity and mortality. Current methods to track adherence are unreliable (patient self-reporting, pill counting, electronic drug monitoring) or require expensive instrumentation (HPLC and/or mass spectroscopy). We are developing rapid, user-friendly, and inexpensive point-of-care diagnostics to monitor adherence and efficacy. We will present our efforts to detect azidothymidine (AZT), a common HAART drug, using a fluorescence assay. In this research, an “add, mix, and measure” assay was developed to detect AZT within minutes. Three different probes designed to release fluorophores when samples containing AZT are added were synthesized and characterized. The limit of detection to AZT in simulated urine samples was determined to be 4 μM in 5 min for one of the probes. This simple and rapid point-of-care test could potentially be used by clinicians and health care workers to monitor the presence of AZT in low resource settings.

Rapid, user-friendly, and inexpensive detection of azidothymidine

ACS Fall 2021

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