A long lasting cough, painful and sometimes producing blood, fever, weight loss, night sweats, and chest pain. These are all symptoms of tuberculosis, or TB, a bacterial disease which spreads by air. According to World Health Organization, one third of the world population, which equals at least two billion people, are carriers of tuberculosis bacilli. One out of ten carriers may eventually develop and suffer from tuberculosis disease. If not treated properly, tuberculosis can be fatal. Indeed, approximately one to two million people lose their lives to this difficult-to-treat disease. Treatment usually involves long courses of multiple antibiotics.

(Interview in Chinese) Lai (m):
Many people are infected with this kind of disease. Most TB cases are found in developing countries. In underdeveloped countries, the situation is even worse. In fact, more than 90% of tuberculosis patients live in very poor countries.

To prevent unnecessary suffering and death, it is important to diagnose tuberculosis at an early stage and give proper treatment to patients. Unfortunately, all current methods of diagnosing tuberculosis have some drawbacks; they are either time-consuming, expensive, or nonspecific, which are especially detrimental to the people in poorer countries. This motivated Dr. Lai Hsin-Chih, Chair of the Department of Medical Biotechnology and Laboratory Science at the Chang Gung University in Formosa (Taiwan), to develop a more efficient and affordable TB test method. His invention is called the TB Test Strip.