Written By: Longjam Dineshwori | Updated : October 5, 2020 9:29 AM IST
The test result can be obtained in about 40 minutes.
You might have been practicing all necessary precautions, including social distancing, wearing a face mask, and hand hygiene to avoid the possibility of COVID-19 infection. But are you sure you're not carrying the novel coronavirus? Many people with this contagious respiratory disease do not show any symptoms (asymptomatic patients). Moreover, COVID-19 shares many of the same symptoms as cold and flu. For example, both COVID-19 and flu patients may experience fever, cough, and fatigue. If people can diagnose COVID-19 at home and prevent contact with others, the spread of the deadly disease could be curbed significantly. The good news is it is possible now. Scientists have developed a low-cost sensor that may enable at-home diagnosis of the coronavirus infection within a few minutes.
This low-cost sensor can analyze small volumes of saliva or blood in less than 10 minutes and provide multiple kinds of data to enable a more accurate diagnosis of COVID-19. The new sensor developed by a research team including scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US is described in the journal Matter.
The same team had previously developed wireless sensors made of graphene -- a sheet-like form of carbon -- that can diagnose conditions like gout by detecting extremely low levels of specific compounds in the blood, saliva, or sweat.
The graphene structures are coupled with antibodies that are sensitive to specific proteins like those on the surface of the novel coronavirus. The new version of the sensor, named SARS-CoV-2 RapidPlex, contains antibodies and proteins that allow it to detect the presence of the novel coronavirus itself, antibodies created by the body to fight the pathogen, and chemical markers of inflammation which indicate the severity of the COVID-19 infection.
With this single sensor, you can get three types of data in as little as a few minutes and acquire a full picture of the COVID-19 infection, including early infection, immunity, and severity, the researchers noted.
Most COVID-testing technologies used currently take hours or even days to produce results as well as require expensive, complicated equipment. But the new system is simple and compact, they added.
Preliminary results indicate that the sensor is highly accurate. However, so far the device has been tested only in the lab with a small number of blood and saliva samples obtained for medical research purposes from individuals who have tested positive or negative for COVID-19.
The researchers stressed the need for a larger-scale test with real-world patients to definitively determine its accuracy. Next, the team plans to begin testing the sensors with hospitalized COVID-19 patients and estimate the suitability of the tests for in-home use as well as to determine how long the sensors last with regular use.
By next year, they hope to make this test available to high-risk individuals for at-home testing. In the future, this platform could be modified for other types of infectious disease testing at home, the researchers said.
With inputs from agencies
