How D4, the device that can predict the severity of a COVID-19 infection or know a person’s immunity

In the period of the second and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and with the emergence of new variants of the virus, Being able to predict the severity of a patient’s infection or whether they have antibodies to mutations that worry the world could mean being one step ahead of SARS-CoV-2.

This is what researchers at Duke University, in the USA, who work in the design of a device capable of reliably detecting multiple COVID-19 antibodies and biomarkers simultaneously.

According to the first results published in the journal Science, the test can distinguish antibodies produced in response to SARS-CoV-2 and four other coronaviruses with 100% accuracy.

Having recently demonstrated that the same platform can detect Ebola infections a day earlier than the PCR test, The researchers say the results show just how flexible the technology can be to adapt to other current or future diseases.

In this sense, they are working to see if the device, called D4, which is easy to use and energy independent, can be used to predict the severity of a COVID-19 infection or to determine a person’s immunity. against different variants of the virus. .

“The D4 trial took six years to develop, but when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a pandemic, we started working to compress all that work into a few months so that we can explore how the test could be used as a public health tool ”. Ashutosh Chilkoti is president of Biomedical Engineering at Duke and noted that the platform “is designed to be adaptable and truly point-of-care, and this is clearly a scenario where portable, rapid, and cost-effective diagnostics would be the key. more useful”.

The technology is based on a polymer brush coating which acts as a kind of non-stick coating to prevent anything other than the desired biomarkers from sticking to the blade. “The high effectiveness of this nonstick coating makes the device incredibly sensitive even at low levels of its targets,” explained Chilkot, who is one of the study’s authors.

“The D4 is a promising platform to complement existing diagnostic technologies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic because it combines the best attributes of LFA and ELISA: it is quantitative, easy to use, widely deployable, it requires only a single 60 ofl drop of blood, and can be performed with minimal user intervention – the researchers described in the publication of Science-. The SARS-CoV-2 D4 test can be used to measure antibody kinetics and individual patient seroconversion directly from blood or raw plasma. This test is very sensitive and specific and is potentially suitable for epidemiological surveillance at the population level using inexpensive microfluidic cassettes that can be transported and stored for an extended period without a cold chain.”.

In this workshop, The researchers tested the device’s ability to detect and quantify antibodies produced against three parts of the COVID-19 virus: a spike protein subunit, a binding domain within the spike protein that binds binds to cells and the nucleocapsid protein that packs the viral RNA.

The test detected antibodies in 31 severe COVID-19 patients after two weeks. It also reported false positives in 41 samples taken from healthy people before the start of the pandemic, as well as 18 samples taken from people infected with four other widely circulating coronaviruses.

The researchers noted that the platform’s proven accuracy and flexibility make it an ideal candidate for developing other types of tests or for use in future outbreaks.

KEEP READING