Diagnosis for COVID-19: current status and future prospects

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a respiratory illness caused by novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), had its first detection in December 2019 in Wuhan (China) and spread across the world. In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic disease. The utilization of prompt and accurate molecular diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 virus, isolating the infected patients, and treating them are the keys to managing this unprecedented pandemic. International travel acted as a catalyst for the widespread transmission of the virus.

Areas covered: This review discusses phenotype, structural, and molecular evolution of recognition elements and primers, its detection in the laboratory, and at point of care. Further, market analysis of commercial products and their performance are also evaluated, providing new ways to confront the ongoing global public health emergency.

Expert commentary: The outbreak for COVID-19 created mammoth chaos in the healthcare sector, and still, day by day, new epicenters for the outbreak are being reported. Emphasis should be placed on developing more effective, rapid, and early diagnostic devices. The testing laboratories should invest more in clinically relevant multiplexed and scalable detection tools to fight against a pandemic like this where massive demand for testing exists.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• SARS-CoV-2
• diagnosis
• Biosensing
• point of care

Article highlights

1. The etiology of SARS-CoV-2 and clinical manifestations of COVID-19 are highlighted.

2. The conventional and state of the art biosensing approaches for diagnosing COVID-19 are emphasized.

3. FDA-approved diagnostics techniques with their sensing mechanism and performance are compared.

4. Diagnostic management and selection of detection tools to face the future emergence of the virus are also discussed.

Declaration of interest

U. Demirci is a founder of and has an equity interest in: (i) DxNow Inc., a company that is developing microfluidic IVF tools and imaging technologies for point-of-care diagnostic solutions, (ii) Koek Biotech, a company that is developing microfluidic technologies for clinical solutions, (iii) Levitas Inc., a company focusing on developing microfluidic products for sorting rare cells from liquid biopsy in cancer and other diseases, and (iv) Hillel Inc., a company bringing microfluidic cell phone tools to home settings. UD’s interests were viewed and managed in accordance with the conflict of interest policies. All other authors declare no financial conflict of interests. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Disclosures

Peer reviewers in this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This manuscript has been supported by research support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid (2027890) and NSF CAREER (1942487).