A Rapid and Highly Sensitive On-site Detection Platform for COVID-19 Testing

到目前为止，新冠肺炎大流行已导致全球240多万人感染，16.6万人死亡，而且没有任何放缓的迹象。尽管公共卫生工作者正在夜以继日地工作，以识别新的新冠肺炎感染病例，但一个明显的瓶颈--缺乏跟上感染率的快餐能力--已经严重暴露出来。新出现的证据表明，大约50%到85%的新冠肺炎患者，无论是没有症状还是有症状前期，仍然能够传播病毒并在未被发现的情况下感染他人，这使得跟踪疾病以控制其传播变得更加困难，这种不幸的情况只能被描述为“盲目飞行”。 目前联盟新冠肺炎应用程序的目标是开发一个基于表面等离子体共振的超灵敏检测平台，该平台将从拭子样本中检测到SARS-CoV-2病毒的存在，而不需要任何样本准备。我们预计检测结果能在10分钟内出来。为了使这个拟议的检测平台取得成功，必须仔细考虑提高检测灵敏度的创新设计。为此，我们建议对SPR检测芯片进行表面修饰，以使检测表面不受污染，减少非特异性结合，最大限度地减少背景噪声；2)提高检测表面捕获目标SARS-CoV-2病毒的效率，以增加检测信号。我们预计检测结果可在10分钟内得到，检测限约为10^4病毒/毫升，与聚合酶链式反应的检测结果相似。这项测试的估计成本约为每项测试20美元。

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 2.4 million infections and more 166,000 deaths worldwide to date, and it is not showing any signs of slowing down. While public health workers are working around the clock to identify new cases of COVID-19 infections, a clear bottleneck - lack of fast tasting capacity to keep up with the rate of infection - has been severely exposed. This problem is exacerbated by emerging evidence suggesting that approximately 50% to 85% of COVID-19 patients, who are either asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic, are still able to transmit the virus and infect others undetected, making it even more difficult to keep track of the disease in order to contain it, an unfortunate situation that can only be described as "flying blind". The goal of the current Alliance COVID-19 application is to develop a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based ultra-sensitive detection platform that will detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus from swabbed samples without the need for any sample preparations. We expect that the test results can be available within 10 minutes. For this proposed detection platform to be successful, innovative designs to enhance detection sensitivity must be carefully considered. To this end, we propose to surface modify the SPR detection chip so that 1) the detection surface is rendered nonfouling to reduce nonspecific bindings to minimize the background noise, and 2) the efficacy of the detection surface to capture target SARS-CoV-2 viruses is enhanced in order to increase detection signals. We expect that the test results can be available within 10 minutes with a limit of detection at about 10^4 viruses/mL, similar to that of the PCR. The estimated cost of the test is about $20/test.