SPEEDS: A portable serological testing platform for rapid electrochemical detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bios.2021.113762Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A portable electrochemical platform for detection of IgG and IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.

  • Rapid detection of IgG and IgM in diluted human serum in 13 min with limits of detection at the ng/mL level.

  • Performance validation using COVID-19 patient samples with high accuracy.

  • Superior device stability over 24-week storage at room temperature.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a worldwide health crisis. Rapid diagnosis, new therapeutics and effective vaccines will all be required to stop the spread of COVID-19. Quantitative evaluation of serum antibody levels against the SARS-CoV-2 virus provides a means of monitoring a patient's immune response to a natural viral infection or vaccination, as well as evidence of a prior infection. In this paper, a portable and low-cost electrochemical immunosensor is developed for the rapid and accurate quantification of SARS-CoV-2 serum antibodies. The immunosensor is capable of quantifying the concentrations of immunoglobulin G (IgG) and immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in human serum. For IgG and IgM, it provides measurements in the range of 10.1 ng/mL − 60 μg/mL and 1.64 ng/mL − 50 μg/mL, respectively, both with an assay time of 13 min. We also developed device stabilization and storage strategies to achieve stable performance of the immunosensor over 24-week storage at room temperature. We evaluated the performance of the immunosensor using COVID-19 patient serum samples collected at different time points after symptom onset. The rapid and sensitive detection of IgG and IgM provided by our immunosensor fulfills the need of rapid COVID-19 serological testing for both point-of-care diagnosis and population immunity screening.

Keywords

Electrochemical biosensing
COVID-19
Serological test
Immunity screening
Point-of-care diagnosis

Cited by (0)

1

These authors contributed equally to this work.

2

Current address: Department of Marine Engineering, Dalian Marine University, 1 Lingshui Road, Dalian, Liaoning, China 116026.

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