“We began to build on the factor of reaching an easy-to-achieve verification approach as soon as we saw progress in Asia and Southern Europe, and before the scenario reached the crisis point in Sweden,” says lead researcher Bjorn Reinius, Director of Research in the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at Karolinska Institutet. “Our approach actually ended until the end of April, and then we made all the knowledge online. “
The spread of the new coronavirus due in 2019 in China’s Wuhan region temporarily became a global pandemic. The maximum rate of transmission and the large number of asymptomatic infections have led to a massive global need for rapid, affordable and effective diagnostic tests that can only be carried out in clinical and non-clinical settings.
Diagnostic tests for COVID-19 are based on the detection of viral RNA in patient samples, such as nasal and throat samples, from which the RNA molecules will need to be extracted and purified. RNA purification is a major bottleneck for the testing process, which requires a lot of apparatus and logistics, as well as expensive chemicals.
Simplifying existing strategies without particularly compromising their accuracy means more testing and faster, which would reduce transmission rate and facilitate early-stage attention.
The Karolinska Institutet Interdepartmental Research Group has developed strategies that absolutely exceed the RNA extraction procedure, so that once the patient’s pattern has been inactivated by heating, making the viral remains more infectious, it can move to the diagnostic reaction that detects presence. virus.
According to the researchers, the maximum keys to the good luck of the approach are the inactivation procedure of the previous virus and a new formula of the solution used to collect and send sampling devices taken from patients.
“By replacing the collection buffer with simple and affordable tampon formulations, we can enable viral detection with maximum sensitivity directly from the original clinical sample, without any intermediate steps,” says Dr. Reinius.
Institutions and research teams around the world have shown great interest in the since the publication of the first edition of the clinical paper on the medRxiv prepress server, which has been reviewed more than 15,000 times before it has even been reviewed by other box studies and officially published in Nature Communications.