Designing and developing vaccines, cures and diagnostic kits can be considered as the first priority for every country which is in the first line of fighting against coronavirus. Now there is only PCR test and IgG/IgM test for COVID-19 assessment. One of the most important problems of this diagnostic test is the time needed by the device to detect infected persons. This problem makes big companies in the field of pharmaceutical and medical devices manufacturing to design and develop rapid test kits.
Our research team found that there are some specific proteins on the viral membrane which can make some reagents undergo a specific chemical reaction. Every reaction has a specific product related to substrates, so by detection of products with indicator reagents we are able to identify the virus in saliva. Indicator reagents usually change the reaction mixture color so by color change we can approve that the person is infected by COVID-19.
We designed two types of kits related to their work:
- Home Test Kits: These are disposable test kits which person should insert his saliva into the vial type indicator reagent containing vessels, and if the color change occurs it means the person is infected.
- Reusable Test Kits: These kits could have saliva condensation function which can help us if a person is in the first days of infection and the concentration of the virus is less in his saliva. In this situation person should insert the saliva sample multi times into the device and device can condensate the inserted sample to increase the concentration of the virus which becomes detectable by indicator reagents. After the test, the vessel can be disinfected by some specific mechanisms and become ready for the next test.
It’s clear that the Home Test Kits may work very faster and better, and Reusable Kits may be used in hospitals and health institutes. One of the most important properties of these deigned kits is a much lower error rate than other devices. (error occurred in other tests could be found in newly submitted articles to different journals)
--
COVID-19 Rapid Diagnostic Kit
Alireza Daneshvar1, Mohammad Hossein Sharifnia1, Masoud Ameri2
1) Pharmacy Student and Researcher - Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Pharmacy - Tehran, Iran
2) Islamic Azad University, Department of electronic and architecture - Semnan, Iran