Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, variants have begun to emerge. We spoke to Jacob Heggestad about his rapid test that can detect these variants.
While several serological tests are currently available, with the emergence of more transmissible and virulent variants of concern (VOCs) there is an urgent need for a test that can quickly measure nAbs against all VOCs simultaneously.
Scientist at Duke University have developed a simple and rapid serological test that could tell doctors how protected a patient is from new variants and those currently circulating in a community and which monoclonal antibodies to use to treat a COVID-19 patient. The new test uses a non-stick polymer brush coating (POEGMA) that stops anything but the desired biomarkers from attaching to a wet test slide.
Credit: Michaela Kane, Duke University
DURHAM, N.C. An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Duke University has developed a highly sensitive and rapid diagnostic test for Ebola virus (EBOV) infection. In monkeys infected with Ebola, this diagnostic, called the D4-assay, proved to be 1000 times more sensitive than the currently approved rapid diagnostic test and capable of detecting the virus a full day earlier than the gold standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.
This work, which appears in
Science Translational Medicine on April 7, was done by biomedical engineers, molecular biologists, and immunologists at Duke University, and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the Galveston National Laboratory.