Development of Antigen Detection Assay for Mycobacterium Tuberculosis: Assay for Diagnosis of Tuberculosis

Although 150 years have elapsed since the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert koch, tuberculosis remains globally a serious and important infectious disease. With the AIDS scourge the disease has gained prominence among the infectious diseases and projections are that large number of cases of tuberculosis will be attributable to HIV infection. Therefore keeping in mind the needs of a developing country, a simple and an inexpensive diagnostic test is required to pick up infected cases so that an early therapy could be initiated. Unfortunately all currently available tests for tuberculosis fall short of their goals. Traditionally used sputum culture techniques, although cheap, take 6 weeks or longer and fail to detect sputum negative and non pulmonary tuberculosis cases. The more recent trend towards developing PCR based technology is academically interesting but due to its high cost, technical skill requirement and presence of large number of bacteria in environment including air may result into false prediction. Serological tests to detect antibodies to tubercular antigens such as an ELISA type test may be more useful and relevant for the Indian scenario. Several