Scientists at the University of Warwick, Iceni Diagnostics Ltd and College Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust have shown their technology to detect SARS-COV-2 making use of sugars instead than antibodies.
Lateral flow diagnostics (LFDs) have been widely applied all through the COVID-19 pandemic to offer speedy identification of folks with an lively infection. These LFDs work by using antibodies, which ‘stick’ to the SARS-COV-2 virus. Professor Matthew Gibson’s investigation crew at the University of Warwick have been doing the job with Iceni Diagnostics to acquire an option program of detection making use of glycans (‘sugars’), where by artificial polymer chains are employed to connect the glycans to the surface of nanoparticles. Viruses generally use glycans as a ‘handle’ to attach to our cells, with the team mimicking this process to allow detection of SARS-COV-2.
Performing with UHCW NHS Rely on, the crew demonstrated that prototype gadgets could establish COVID-19 optimistic swabs across a assortment of viral loads. The team also showed that the know-how functioned very well with the spike proteins from variants of issue, which is a crucial benefit of working with glycan-binding engineering.
This perform plainly demonstrates that glycan-recognition engineering can be used to establish pathogens, which the academic/field group are actively building additional as part of a collaborative project.

This function exhibits the probable of making use of glycans as alternative detection reagents, as opposed to the standard antibody-centered methods. In addition, the use of our polymeric linkers, which lets us to present the glycan on the nanoparticles (which make the crimson line), shows the advantage of true cross-disciplinary, cross-sector collaboration. This work displays that our solution can function with most important scientific samples and we are actively building this into a true-entire world device with our partners.”


Matthew Gibson, Professor at Warwick Health-related Faculty and the Section of Chemistry, College of Warwick

Professor Dimitris Grammatopoulos, Professor at Warwick Medical School and Consultant in Clinical Biochemistry at UHCW NHS Trust, additional: “This is a testament to the chopping-edge scientific research having place at the University of Warwick and UHCW NHS Have faith in. Original final results of this prototype confirmed it can conduct favorably in comparison to founded COVID-19 exams with respect to cost, time, accuracy and trustworthiness. We are delighted to collaborate on this research.”
Professor Rob Field, Iceni Diagnostics’ Main Scientific Officer, concluded: “Our ambition was to exemplify how an educational and business collaboration can translate hard-core scientific discoveries into useful solutions, and this study has established we can do this by combining our deep experience in glycoscience. The effective testing of the prototype machine and glycan-based system will now empower us to progress our viral and other pathogen pipelines, and we are delighted to continue doing work with the College of Warwick workforce on this software.”
Source:
Journal reference:
Baker, A. N., et al. (2021) Glycan-Primarily based Move-Via System for the Detection of SARS-COV-2. ACS Sensors. doi.org/10.1021/acssensors.1c01470.
