Affinity Biosensors for COVID-19 Antibodies

生物传感器为快速诊断提供了一种非常有用、用户友好且经济实惠的方法。上世纪90年代，随着血糖生物传感器S的引入，糖尿病患者就出现了这种情况。现在，这种传感器已经发展到使用智能手机进行全面的疾病管理系统。随着将亲和剂连接到电子表面的新技术进步的发现，现在可以生产针对任何蛋白质的生物传感器。亲和试剂是一种生物化学物质，它能非常紧密地结合蛋白质，例如抗体或病毒抗原，从而使正在开发的测试完全针对被检测的目标。该项目的愿景和主要重点领域将是产生冠状病毒抗体和抗原的生物传感器(新冠肺炎)，以便对病毒进行血清学测试。与这一主要目标相关的是对一套新的电子元件进行试验，以运行所创造的生物传感器。将这些和所制造的生物传感器结合在一起，将允许生产一种紧凑的现场测量系统，以检测一个人是否已经感染，甚至一个人是否仍然受到感染。项目方案将证明制造生物传感器的可行性，并测试它们对要检测的病毒蛋白的敏感性和特异性。到目前为止，检测新冠肺炎的血清学测试在现场应用还不够充分。旨在通过将新的特定试剂引入生物传感器来克服这一问题，这将是该项目的主要成果。除了检测新冠肺炎之外，整个系统还具有未来的可行性，因为它可以通过改变使用的亲和剂来改变生物传感器的特异性。因此，如果出现不同的病毒，可以通过用不同的试剂制作不同的生物传感器来改变特异性，从而检测到与任何新病毒相关的蛋白质和抗体。此外，所描述的设备可以改装成检测任何蛋白质，使其能够在未来检测任何疾病。

Biosensors provide an extremely useful, user friendly and cost effective route for rapid diagnosis. This has been seen for diabetics with the introduction of the blood glucose biosensor in the 1990's, which now has advanced to full disease management systems using smartphones. With new technological advances discovered to link affinity reagents to electronic surfaces, it is now possible to produce biosensors to any protein. Affinity reagents are biochemicals that bind proteins e.g. antibodies or virus antigens, very tightly thereby making the tests being developed absolutely specific to the target being detected. The vision for this project and the main area of focus will be to generate biosensors to coronavirus antibodies and antigens (COVID-19) to make a serological test for the virus. Associated with this main aim is a trial of a new set of electronic components to run the biosensors created. Combining these and the biosensors made will allow the production of a compact field measurement system to detect if a person has been infected and even if a person is still infected.The project protocols will demonstrate the feasibility of the biosensors to be manufactured and also to test their sensitivity and specificity to the virus proteins to be detected. To date the serological tests to detect COVID-19 have been inadequate in field use. It is aimed to overcome this with new specific reagents being incorporated into the biosensors and this will be a prime outcome of the project.In addition to detecting COVID-19, the whole system is future proofed, because it will be possible to change the specificity of the biosensors by changing the affinity reagent used. Therefore if a different virus appears, proteins and antibodies associated with any new virus can be detected by making a different biosensor with different reagents to change the specificity. In addition, the device described could be adapted to detect any protein, giving the capability of detecting any disease in the future.