Affinity Biosensors for COVID-19 Antibodies

生物传感器提供了一个非常有用的，用户友好和成本效益的快速诊断途径。随着20世纪90年代血糖生物传感器的引入，糖尿病患者已经看到了这一点，现在已经发展到使用智能手机的完整疾病管理系统。随着新技术的进步，发现将亲和试剂连接到电子表面，现在可以生产任何蛋白质的生物传感器。亲和试剂是与蛋白质（如抗体或病毒抗原）紧密结合的生物化学品，从而使所开发的测试对所检测的目标绝对特异。该项目的愿景和主要关注领域将是生产冠状病毒抗体和抗原（COVID-19）的生物传感器，以进行病毒的血清学测试。与这个主要目标相关的是一组新的电子元件的试验，以运行所创建的生物传感器。将这些和生物传感器结合起来，将能够生产一个紧凑的现场测量系统，以检测一个人是否已被感染，甚至一个人是否仍被感染。项目协议将证明制造生物传感器的可行性，并测试其对待检测病毒蛋白的灵敏度和特异性。迄今为止，检测COVID-19的血清学检测在实地使用中还不充分。该项目的主要成果是将新的特异性试剂引入生物传感器中，以克服这一问题。除了检测COVID-19之外，整个系统还经过了未来检验，因为可以通过改变所使用的亲和试剂来改变生物传感器的特异性。因此，如果出现不同的病毒，可以通过使用不同的试剂制造不同的生物传感器来检测与任何新病毒相关的蛋白质和抗体，以改变特异性。此外，所描述的设备可以适用于检测任何蛋白质，从而在未来具有检测任何疾病的能力。

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.