Waseem Asghar
Florida Atlantic University, FL·Biomedical Engineering
About one in four people living with HIV do not know they are infected. Even where treatment is free or affordable, many people are not on it.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
HIV self-testing
point-of-care diagnostics
viral load
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Develop a disposable microchip that selectively detects HIV-1 directly from whole blood samples, rather than detecting antibodies against the virus.
- Make the self-test sensitive enough to detect HIV below 1,000 copies per milliliter. This would allow it to catch acute infection in the first weeks and viral rebound in patients on antiretroviral therapy.
- Engineer the assay to be fully automated (sample-in, answer-out), to give results within 40 minutes, and to stay stable without refrigeration.
More about the research
Today's HIV self-tests detect antibodies, proteins the body makes against the virus. These appear only three to four weeks after infection, so the tests miss new infections. They also cannot show when treatment is failing. Antiretroviral therapy (ART), the standard drug treatment for HIV, keeps the virus in check, but monitoring requires testing that most self-tests cannot provide. No self-test on the market can detect the virus itself during the first two weeks after infection, the acute phase. None can detect viral rebound, when the virus returns in a patient on ART.
Why it matters
An affordable self-test that detects HIV within weeks of infection and flags treatment failure could help people learn their status sooner and help patients on ART know when their virus is returning. Because the device would need no refrigeration, it could widen testing access in places where lab-based viral load monitoring is unavailable. It could also support HIV treatment programs worldwide, where ART coverage remains about 59%.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Weihua Guan
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Develop a single-tube multiplex recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) assay that copies several respiratory pathogen targets at once with balanced amplification and minimal cross-reactivity.
Sally McFall
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a DASH platform test that detects hepatitis C viral RNA from a fingerstick blood sample in 15 minutes, so active infection can be diagnosed in a single step without a laboratory.
Matthew R. Reynolds
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how long virus takes to rebound after stopping antiretroviral therapy in rhesus macaques given defined reservoirs of 5x10^4, 1x10^4, 1x10^3 or 1x10^2 laboratory-generated, latently SIV-infected autologous cells.
The school
Florida Atlantic University: 7 labs on PI Pages, $88M a year on research, 124 research doctorates a year.
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