VIRUSES thrive inside the body but their sensitivity to temperature and humidity means that once outside the body they often die before scientists can identify them.

Now Gordon Skinner of the University of Birmingham’s medical school has found a way to preserve a virus en route to a hospital laboratory and start the process of culturing it. Normally, a swab of blood or saliva is moved in a tube containing a transport medium. Skinner’s tube contains a layer of living cells on which a virus can stay viable for six weeks. The tube sits inside a disposable heater to keep the sample at body temperature while it is moved.

In a study to be reported in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Virological Methods, baby hamster kidney cells were used?but the type of cells would vary according to the range of host species of the suspected pathogen.

The study compared the detection of live virus in samples from 106 patients with suspected genital herpes transported conventionally and in a Skinner tube. A positive diagnosis was only possible in 23 per cent of samples transported conventionally compared with 36 per cent in the Skinner tube.

Skinner has patented the Intra-cell system and has assigned the marketing rights to local biotechnology company Sci Tech. The company’s medical device director Ian Pardoe says the next stage is to modify the storage medium to allow a virus to survive inside a refrigerator.

Donald Carrigan, a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin medical school at Madison, says: "The Skinner tube could be very important in improving sensitivity in the detection of certain viruses." Early detection would help doctors control the spread of disease, says Carrigan.