HIV supposes an important Health concern, with 1.8 million of new infections occuring every year and 150000 of them in children. Even being an incurable disease, its detection in initial stages can help to establish an early treatment to reduce viral processes and irreversible damage on the immune and central nervous system, thus impacting positively in the quality of life of the patients.

If newborn children are not treated, they have 50% possibilities to die before their 2 years of age; because of this, the WHO recommends to test babies at risk of being infected in their 4-6 first weeks of life. The widely extended serological tests are not useful for this purpose, because HIV-specific antibodies transferred from an infected mother can be detected during the first 18 months. Thus, the detection of viral genetic material is the most appropriate strategy, but the best nucleic acid amplification techniques succeed in diagnosing AIDS only after 10-20 days of infection.

To improve this time limits and reduce the complexity of the molecular techniques, this project aims at the development of a point-of-care device able to detect a especific protein from the viral capsid, basing the recognition on the potential of aptamers, that could allow for an AIDS diagnosis in the very first days of the infection and would consider genetic variability . Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids showing high affinity and specifity towards their targets that have demonstrated to be suitable for the detection of viral and bacterial proteins. Thus, this technology could suppose a simple, sensitive and cost-effective platform to diagnose AIDS in the first days of infection and act rapidly.