Detection of Airborne Viruses
kth.se
kth.se
If they replace ELISA with a nanopore sequencer like Oxford’s MinION then you could detect all the DNA RNA in your breath and feed that data into algorithms like BLASTN. Suddenly you can see viruses no one ever saw, and thousands of them at once. Meta genomics is more sensitive than ELISA because you can see everything and more efficient because you can use the same reagents to test for anything. Then we detect virus everywhere as soon as the sequence is available on NCBI (we had a sequence for CoV-19 two months & four days ago)
https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
However, the entire device is just made of plastic, silicon and metal, which are very cheap materials. The majority of the cost is R&D cost, which if one were to produce millions of this device would be amortized and you could bring the cost down to that of a $10 fake ink cartridge, which coincidentally has awfully similar technology.
I would be excited if this was cost effective and more sensitive and specific for bacteria and viruses than what we have currently.
Those factors alone make sequencing alone a near impossibility in rapid detection. PCR based assays are a much better candidate and could identify different strains in less than a few hours.
Coupling good capture with amplification and detection is required. When working on dna detection you use something like pcr for signal amplification.
But surface detection can in some cases be more sensitive, since you generally have a lot more surface fragments available than you have dna or rna. Especially since many viral diseases form have huge ratios of surface fragments per every well formed infectious viral particle.
Generally: a sequencer by itself doesn't have the sensitivity required. For example, for norovirus we're talking about detecting a few virus particles per cubic meter of air. You need insanely sensitive detection tech to be able to do that.
Neither does OP.
Unfortunately the funding for continuation was lost in the shambles of the partial collapse of Getinge a few years ago. I was not able to find anyone else interested to continue funding the prototype development when the remnants of Getinge did not prioritise the project.
Near real time in this case can mean as little as a few hours.
We had a total funding of ca EUR 5M for the first prototyping project. If anyone has interest and money, I can pull together people and ip.
think about what you are saying, how could what you say be true, and some diseases be more air borne than others? if a pathogen can trigger specific immune responses that result in runny noses, or blocked noses it has some control over the viscosity of different types of mucous our body produces...
so has this droplet size distribution been measured for covid-19?
My thoughts were about fluid dynamics and what causes a particle with a mass greater than air to become airborne in the first place - force of updraft jet on surface area overcomes the force of weight, right? So that'd be determined by the velocity of the air flow and the properties of the fluids interacting. So you'd have to first either measure velocity of the ejection or make an estimate and you'd pick a sensor to measure the different particle sizes. Those sensors typically only give a range of particles as output such as <2.5u, <10u, etc in ppm. You'd be forced to group the distribution into discreet intervals and accept more inherent sensor error. Then you have a non-homogeneous fluid with insoluble solids in it launched at variable velocities each time so you probably would need multiple samples (how many to overcome this variance? Can you do it with out over powering your analysis?). Whether the data was useful would depend on some really good designs that minimize the variance of the samples.
It would be an interesting experiment, but I doubt you would find statistically significant results between the different illnesses based on runny noses vs blocked noses viscosity change. I don't think you really need to though because runny or blocked nose is already a diagnostic symptom that doesn't require particle size distribution to determine.