Team:Grenoble/Human Practice/Cost
From 2012.igem.org
Design of the device and comparative study of cost assessment
Specifications
Based on the requirements of the medical field (see the section meeting for further details), we set our pathogen detection specifications. So, sEnsiColi should be:
- Sensitive
- Reliable (little false positives)
- Fast
- Easy to use
- Lower in price than the current methods.
Design of sEnsiColi
Regarding the specifications above, we set two possible designs for sEnsiColi. The first one is intended for prevention purposes such as assessing the contamination level of hospital’s rooms. The design of this detection-kit is given by the picture below:- A detection-kit that is absolutely easy to use and needs no qualified staff to use it. This test is approximately ten times faster than a traditional plate test (48h) and twice slower than a PCR (from 2 to 3 hours) as it needs 5 hours to give a visible output signal. Besides, thanks to this system, the probability of having a false positive response is expected to be low. Its design makes it a competitive candidate for assessing contamination level in medical environment
- A 96-well plate kit for diagnosis, easy to use, fast enough (5 hours) and above all highly reliable.
Comparative study of cost assessment
We wanted to make sure that sEnsiColi would be competitive in term of price. So we conducted a comparative cost analysis between the mostly used detection methods in the CHU and our two possible designs of sEnsiColi. For the cost assessment, we followed a very specific process in order to have a precise and reliable result. The first step was to set the protocols of production for each device (for the PCR we followed our PCR protocol available on biological section.) The next step was to define all the flows including electricity, handworker’s wages, raw materials, consumables… Finally, we had to search for the cost of each used component and calculate the total cost. You can find here the files we created to assess the cost of the PCR and sEnsiColi test in its two forms: test tube and 96-well plate.Method/device | Cost (€) |
---|---|
PCR | 21.70 |
sEnsiColi (test tube) | 0.23 |
sEnsiColi (96-well plate) | 5.77 |