Abstract
Respiratory viral infections threaten human life and inflict an enormous healthcare burden worldwide. Frequent monitoring of viral antibodies and viral load can effectively help to control the spread of the virus and make timely interventions. However, current methods for detecting viral load require dedicated personnel and are time-consuming. Additionally, COVID-19 detection is generally relied on an automated PCR analyzer, which is highly instrument-dependent and expensive. As such, emerging technologies in the development of respiratory viral load assays for point-of-care (POC) testing are urgently needed for viral screening. Recent advances in loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), biosensors, nanotechnology-based paper strips and microfluidics offer new strategies to develop a rapid, low-cost, and user-friendly respiratory viral monitoring platform. In this review, we summarized the traditional methods in respiratory virus detection and present the state-of-art technologies in the monitoring of respiratory virus at POC.
Highlights
We elaborate on the commercial rapid PCR detection platform and immunoassays, portable amplification systems, and upcoming new approaches such as biosensors and microfluidics-based virus detection that have been proposed for POC viral load detection
As COVID-19 has greatly dispersed around the world, Xpert® Xpress SARSCoV-2 was fabricated for the rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2, which has been demonstrated to be a highly-sensitive test in numerous analytical and clinical studies [36,37]
Influenza A & B kit used for nasal wash specimens from 240 pediatric patients showed that the detection rate of two influenza viruses for Binax was greater than 97.9%, and the sensitivity for both was almost the same as that of reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) [38]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The rapid spread of infectious respiratory diseases prompts significant steps toward disease prevention and easing economic pressure. Rapid and effective means of monitoring can alleviate the spread of such diseases, reduce the accompanying economic burden, and gain valuable time toward effective disease prevention. These techniques are time-consuming, thereby delaying effective treatment and leading to the lack of ability to control the spread of infectious diseases in a timely manner. In backward regions, the lack of resources and time-consuming nature of detection led to great challenges in focusing on the prevention and control of infectious diseases. There is an urgent need for viral load detection to monitor the virus and provide information to manage infected patients in a timely manner. We elaborate on the commercial rapid PCR detection platform and immunoassays, portable amplification systems, and upcoming new approaches such as biosensors and microfluidics-based virus detection that have been proposed for POC viral load detection
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