COVID-19: Oxford scientists develop rapid diagnostic test to detect virus within 5 minutes

On October 14, UK’s University of Oxford scientists anunced that its Department of Physics has developed an extremely rapid diagstic test that can test coronavirus strain in less than 5 minutes in a human body. In research that university published in preprint server for health sciences MedRxiv, scientists said that invative testing method did t require any lysis, purification, or amplification steps that were time-consuming in regular testing. Researchers trained a neural network to differentiate SARS-CoV-2 from or respiratory pathogens like flu,  influenza, seasonal viruses from negative clinical samples. 

research for a promising alternative method of COVID-19 testing was funded by Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and was me possible with use of commercial microscopes from Oxford Naimaging. testing method involves taking direct throat swabs from COVID-19 patients, without any geme extraction in samples that w require just short fluorescent DNA strands.

Oxford’s Naimaging instrument can detect fluorescently-labeled viruses from coronaviruses. Oxford revealed that researchers also used machine-learning software that will identify or viruses from SARS-CoV-2 due to difference in its chemistry, size, and shape. Scientists collaborated with doctors at John Rcliffe Hospital in Oxford and ran a trial of technique on COVID-19 patient samples, collected using conventional RT-PCR methods.

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“‘Unlike or techlogies that detect a delayed antibody response or that require expensive, tedious and time-consuming sample preparation, our method quickly detects intact virus particles; meaning assay is simple, extremely rapid, and cost-effective,” Oxford’s Department of Physics' Professor Achilles Kapanidis said in release.

[ test uses a simple colour change to identify presence of virus. A positive sample changes from pink to yellow. Credit: Oxford Site]

To develop an 'integrated device'

A former researcher at Royal Society Fellow at University of Oxford, w at Warwick Medical School, said that winters bring unpredictable effects of co-circulation of SARS-CoV-2 with or seasonal respiratory viruses, and refore newly developed testing method can reliably distinguish between different viruses in clinical samples, which offers a crucial vant in midst of second wave of infection. researchers at Oxford also aim to develop an integrated device that might take an estimated six months to establish at airports, business outlets, music venues, etc.

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