Publisher Health

It is often said that “children eat what they like,” but the results of a new study by Penn State nutritionists and sensory scientists suggests that when it comes to meals, it is more accurate and more relevant to say, “children do not eat what they dislike.”
There is an important difference, according to lead researcher Kathleen Keller, associate professor in the departments of Nutritional Sciences and Food Science, who conducted an experiment involving 61 children ages 4-6 years to assess the relationship between their liking of foods in a meal and subsequent intake. The research revealed that when presented with a meal, disliking is a stronger predictor of what youngsters eat than liking.
“In other words, rather than high-liking driving greater intake, our study data indicate that lower-liking led children to avoid some foods and leave them on the plate,” she said. “Kids have a limited amount of room in their bellies, so when they are handed a tray, they gravitate toward their favorite thing and typically eat that first, and then make choices about whether to eat other foods.”
Study co-author John Hayes, professor of food science and director of the Sensory Evaluation Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences, puts it another way.
“For 50 plus years, we’ve known liking and intake are positively correlated, but this often leads to the mistaken assumption that if it tastes better, you will eat more,” he said. “Reality is a bit more nuanced. In adults, we know that if you really like a food, you may or may not eat it. But if you don’t like it, you’ll rarely or never eat it. These new data show the same pattern is true in young kids.”
Children participated in two identical laboratory sessions in the study conducted in Keller’s Children’s Eating Behavior Laboratory in the College of Health and Human Development, where seven foods — chicken nuggets, ketchup, potato chips, grapes, broccoli, cherry tomatoes and cookies — were included on a tray. Also included were two beverages, fruit punch and milk.

A series of new studies by researchers at NYU College of Dentistry highlights how e-cigarettes alter oral health and may be contributing to gum disease. The latest, published in mBio, finds that e-cigarette users have a unique oral microbiome — the community of bacteria and other microorganisms — that is less healthy than nonsmokers but potentially healthier than cigarette smokers, and measures worsening gum disease over time.
“To our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of oral health and e-cigarette use. We are now beginning to understand how e-cigarettes and the chemicals they contain are changing the oral microbiome and disrupting the balance of bacteria,” said Deepak Saxena, who led the research with Xin Li; both are professors of molecular pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry.
Gum disease affects nearly half of U.S. adults over 30 years of age. Smoking cigarettes is a known risk factor for developing gum disease, but less is known about the impact of e-cigarettes — which vaporize nicotine and other chemicals — on oral health, especially the long-term consequences of vaping.
The researchers studied the oral health of 84 adults from three groups: cigarette smokers, e-cigarette users, and people who have never smoked. Gum disease was assessed through two dental exams six months apart, during which plaque samples were taken to analyze the bacteria present.
Changes to gum health
All participants had some gum disease at the start of the study, with cigarette smokers having the most severe disease, followed by e-cigarette users. After six months, the researchers observed that gum disease had worsened in some participants in each group, including several e-cigarette users.

Over 90 percent of patients with transfusion-dependent thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder, no longer needed monthly blood transfusions years after receiving gene therapy, according to an international Phase 3 clinical trial that for the first time included children younger than 12 years of age. Twenty-two patients were evaluated (ranging in age 4-34 years), including pediatric patients enrolled at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“It is impressive that so many patients in the study, including the youngest patients, acquired transfusion independence that was durable,” said study co-author Jennifer Schneiderman, MD, MS, from the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Lurie Children’s and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “At Lurie Children’s, we have participated in these gene therapy trials from the earliest stages and have been enrolling patients for close to a decade. The current study represents the next step in moving this intervention into clinical practice, which will increase access to a potential cure for patients with transfusion-dependent thalassemia.”
People with thalassemia do not make enough functional hemoglobin in their red blood cells, which interferes with oxygen getting to all parts of the body. Those with the most severe type of the disease require red blood cell transfusions every month for survival. Frequent transfusions, however, can cause serious complications due to iron overload and infections, especially if one’s spleen has been removed.
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from someone who makes healthy hemoglobin can be a potentially curative treatment, but it requires a well-matched donor, which can be difficult to find. It also poses a risk for graft vs. host disease.
This gene therapy study uses the patient’s own stem cells that were treated in the lab with a modified virus to add functional copies of the gene that is defective in thalassemia. Before the new cells can be infused, the patients need to receive chemotherapy, which typically involves a hospital stay of at least four to five weeks for close monitoring for fevers, infections, and other potential complications. Patients typically reached transfusion-free status about one month after the autologous stem cell transplantation. Patients reported in this manuscript had been monitored for a range of 13 months to four years after receiving their new cells.
Treatment-related adverse events were typical of autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and the required chemotherapy, such as low platelets, low hemoglobin, low white blood cell count, mouth sores, fever, and hepatic veno-occlusive disease. Four patients had at least one adverse event that was considered by the investigators to be related or possibly related to gene therapy. All events were nonserious except for thrombocytopenia (low number of platelets in the blood) in one patient. No cases of secondary cancer due to the chemotherapy or gene therapy were observed. As in the earlier stage trials of this gene therapy, the small number of patients who did not achieve transfusion-free status needed transfusions less often.
Based on the positive results of this Phase 3 trial, Bluebird Bio, Inc., the trial sponsor, has applied for the FDA review, which is expected to be completed in the summer 2022.
Research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is conducted through the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. The Manne Research Institute is focused on improving child health, transforming pediatric medicine and ensuring healthier futures through the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Lurie Children’s is ranked as one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report. It is the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

IUDs work at least as well as tubal ligation, while causing fewer side effects, according to a new study.
The analysis, based on six years of Medi-Cal claims data, is the first rigorous look at how long-term birth control methods perform in the real world.
This study overturns the widely held assumption that tubal ligation, which requires surgery and is permanent, is more effective than an IUD, which can be easily removed when pregnancy is desired.
Published Feb. 22, 2022, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the study found that hormonal IUDs were more effective than tubal ligation at preventing pregnancies, while copper IUDs were as effective.
“Tubal ligation is really no longer the gold standard for pregnancy prevention,” said Eleanor Bimla Schwarz, MD, professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
Researchers examined claims data from more than 83,000 Medi-Cal recipients who received either a tubal ligation or an IUD between 2008 and 2014 to see how many became pregnant within a year. They found that 2.40 percent with levonorgestrel IUDs and 2.99 percent with copper IUDs got pregnant, compared with 2.64 percent of those who underwent laparoscopic tubal ligations.

Science is one step closer to developing targeted drug therapies that may reduce seizures, sleep disorders, and related symptoms common in people with intellectual disabilities.
Research led by a team of UNLV neuroscientists has shown the potential to zero in on the root-level cause of a host of adverse symptoms associated with unique subtypes of neurodevelopmental disorders, work that could one day improve the lives of millions worldwide.
The study, published Feb. 15 in the Nature journal Molecular Psychiatry, builds on previous research by UNLV neuroscientist Rochelle Hines and collaborators, which discovered that two key proteins — collybistin and the GABAA receptor ?2 subunit — control the firing of brain cells and contribute to epileptic seizures, learning and memory deficiencies, sleep disturbances, and other symptoms frequently associated with various forms of intellectual disability including Down syndrome, autism, and ADHD.
The team’s newest findings unveiled that mutations in ARHGEF9 — the gene that codes for collybistin — lead to intellectual disability through impaired ?2 subunit function. The team further showed that ?2 is a central hub for many of the adverse neurological symptoms characteristic of multiple intellectual disability subtypes.
“Seizures and sleep deficits are two of the most common and most disruptive symptoms in children with neurodevelopmental disorders, and sleep deficits in particular are not well treated and can impact the entire family,” said Hines, who partnered with UNLV faculty and undergraduate and graduate student researchers, as well as scientists from Tufts University and Boston Children’s Hospital. “This research gives new hope to patients that we can now develop drug therapies and provide more precise interventions.”
In addition to patients with neurodevelopmental disorders, researchers said their study has the potential to improve the quality of life more broadly for people who grapple with sleep dysfunction, epilepsy, anxiety, hyperactivity, and other neurological abnormalities.
Takeaways Intellectual disability is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that can arise from genetic mutations. People with these disorders — Down syndrome and autism are the most prevalent — frequently report related symptoms such as epileptic seizures, learning and memory difficulties, and disrupted sleep-wake cycles. By manipulating interaction between two key brain proteins, scientists discovered that one of them — called the ?2 subunit — plays a more critical role in intellectual disability and related symptoms than researchers previously thought. Knowing which functional interaction is responsible for triggering adverse effects caused by ARHGEF9 gene mutations will help researchers develop precise drug interventions — providing enhanced care to patients. Further research is underway, with hope that the work may one day advance to clinical trials.The National Institutes of Health supported the research with funding. Additional researchers include UNLV neuroscientist Dustin Hines; UNLV student researchers April Contreras, Betsua Garcia, Jeffrey S. Barker, and Austin J. Boren; Boston Children’s Hospital neurologist Christelle Moufawad El Achkar; and Tufts University School of Medicine neuroscientist Stephen J. Moss.
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Materials provided by University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Original written by Keyonna Summers. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and their collaborators at the Max Planck Bristol Center for Minimal Biology at the University of Bristol have developed a new approach to study Sars-CoV-2. For systematic and standardized research of Sars-CoV-2 they built minimalistic synthetic virus particles where they can incorporate distinct structures of the Sars-CoV-2 virus like the spike protein. This allowed scientists to study single molecular mechanisms in a controlled setting, which they can further manipulate and tune. Using this technique to study the spike protein, which has been shown to be critical for virus-host interaction and infection, they discovered a switching mechanism. Upon binding of inflammatory fatty acids, the spike protein changes its conformation, thereby becoming less “visible” to the hosts immune system.
The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has been and is still one of the main global health concerns. Completely understanding Sars-CoV-2 pathogenesis and the molecular mechanisms behind the infection yields great opportunities to overcome the pandemic. Shedding light upon viral functions and host-virus interactions will facilitate the development of targeted therapies, vaccines or other preventive measures. However, research on Sars-CoV-2 in the laboratory environment comes with many challenges. One is the increased safety requirement for experiments, another is studying distinct mechanisms during the infection rather than the whole pathogenesis to better understand those single processes.
Building artificial SARS-CoV-2 virions
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and their collaborators used their expertise in bottom-up synthetic biology to overcome some of those challenges. For their study, they developed artificial Sars-CoV-2 virions. The virions have a similar structure to natural viruses but do not contain any genetic information. Therefore, they can be used safely.
“Even more important for us, as we build these synthetic virions from scratch, is that we can precisely design their composition and structure. This allows us to perform a very systematic, step-by-step study on distinct mechanisms,” says Oskar Staufer, first author of the paper, former postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and current postdoc at the University of Oxford. He therefore sees great potential in using the synthetic virus-like particles in a multitude of analysis and characterization pipelines to study viruses beyond the current application for Sars-CoV-2.
Spike protein switching mechanism to avoid the immune system?
They first used the artificial minimalistic virions to study the effect of inflammatory fatty acids on the spike protein of Sars-CoV-2. Inflammatory fatty acids are released during any inflammation in the body and they help facilitate immune response and healing processes. The spike protein is critical for host-virus interaction. On the one hand the virus uses the spike protein to bind to the host cells ACE2 receptors. This enables the virus to fuse with the host cell and release its genetic information. On the other hand, antibodies produced by the host can bind to the spike protein, thereby marking the virus a target for the immune system.
It was known before, that the spike protein has a distinct region where inflammatory fatty acids can bind. However, the function of this binding pocket was previously not understood. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and collaborators in Bristol now used the artificial Sars-CoV-2 virions to study this exact mechanism. They show that upon binding of a fatty acid, the spike protein changes its conformation and “folds.” As a result, binding to the ACE2 receptor of the host is no longer possible and fewer antibodies can bind to the protein.
Researchers can now start to understand why this cowering mechanism is used by the virus and determine whether this information can be used to develop therapeutic strategies. “By “ducking down” of the spike protein upon binding of inflammatory fatty acids, the virus becomes less visible to the immune system. This could be a mechanism to avoid detection by the host and a strong immune response for a longer period of time and increase total infection efficiency,” says Oskar Staufer. However, scientists are just at the beginning of determining the function of the folding mechanism, but the use of artificial virions will allow for a systematic approach. “Applying such synthetic biology concepts to a problem with global impact is truly exciting!,” says Oskar Staufer.
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Scientists have known for years that a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) can be lowered with lifestyle changes such as modifying diet, exercise, alcohol and tobacco use. Now Anand Chockalingam and Sharan Srinivas at the University of Missouri demonstrate in a new study that a long-term association also exists between an adolescent’s psychological well-being and their risk of CVD as an adult.
Specifically, Chockalingam, a professor of clinical medicine, and Srinivas, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, have found that people who are more optimistic or positive when they are adolescents can lower their chances of being in the high-risk category for CVD as an adult.
“Here, we are recognizing the role of the environment and lifestyle in heart disease,” said, Chockalingam, who is also a cardiologist with MU Health Care. “Some prior research has shown that more than 80% of all heart attacks can be prevented with a few simple lifestyle interventions at any point in the individual’s life. Although a heart attack may occur at the age of 55, the underlying buildup of plaque or atherosclerosis starts much earlier, often in teenage years. By exploring healthy habits and connecting with optimistic peers in the impressionable teenage years, it becomes intuitive to sustain a good lifestyle.”
Chockalingam believes this study emphasizes the value of optimism in an adolescent’s life.
“Adolescents are simultaneously understanding the world as well as their own inner nature and mindset,” Chockalingam said. “Therefore, parents and other caregivers have a substantial role in the lifetime resilience and outlook of children. The biggest legacy that anyone can pass on for subsequent generations is optimism.”
The team analyzed data from study participants involved with the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Chockalingam said the database served as a rich source of information for their study.

A network of brain regions activated by the placebo effect overlaps with several regions targeted by brain-stimulation therapy for depression, according to a new analysis by a team that included several researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), who collaborated with colleagues at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre at the University of Toronto. The findings of this study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, will aid in understanding the neurobiology of placebo effects and could influence how the results of clinical trials of brain stimulation are interpreted. This work may also offer insights on how to harness placebo effects for the treatment of a variety of conditions.
The placebo effect occurs when a patient’s symptoms improve because he or she expects a therapy to help (due to a variety of factors), but not from the specific effects of the treatment itself. Recent research indicates that there is a neurological basis for the placebo effect, with imaging studies identifying a pattern of changes that happen in certain brain regions when a person experiences this phenomenon.
The use of brain-stimulation techniques for patients with depression that doesn’t respond adequately to medication or psychotherapy has gained wider use in recent years. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive treatment in which a clinician applies a coil to the patient’s head and delivers electromagnetic pulses to the brain. The effect of TMS on brain activity has been established over the last three decades in animal and human research studies, with several TMS devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating depression. What’s more, there’s growing research on the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS, which requires an implanted device) for hard-to-treat depression, too.
The senior author of the Molecular Psychiatry paper, Emiliano Santarnecchi, PhD, director of the Precision Neuroscience & Neuromodulation Program at the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging at MGH, saw studies of brain stimulation as a unique opportunity to learn more about the neurobiology of the placebo effect. Santarnecchi and his co-investigators conducted a meta-analysis and review of neuroimaging studies involving healthy subjects and patients to create a “map” of brain regions activated by the placebo effect. They also analyzed studies of people treated with TMS and DBS for depression to identify brain regions targeted by the therapies. The team found that several sites in the brain that are activated by the placebo effect overlap with brain regions targeted by TMS and DBS.
Santarnecchi and his colleagues believe that this overlap has critical importance in interpreting the results of research on brain stimulation for conditions such as depression. In clinical trials, a significant portion of depression patients receiving brain stimulation improve — but so do many patients receiving placebo (sham) treatment, in which no stimulation is administered, which has led to confusion over the therapy’s benefits. A possible explanation is “that there is a significant placebo effect when you do any form of brain stimulation intervention,” says Santarnecchi. Unlike taking a pill, receiving TMS involves treatment in a surgery-like setting, with imaging monitors and a clinician applying a coil to the patient’s head. There are loud clicks with each pulse delivered. “So the patient thinks, ‘Wow, they are really activating my brain’, so you get a lot of expectation,” says Santarnecchi.
Elevated placebo effects associated with brain stimulation may create problems when studying the intervention, says the first author of the paper, cognitive neurologist Matthew Burke, MD, of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, in Toronto. If brain stimulation and the placebo effect overlap in activating the same brain regions, then those circuits could be maximally activated by placebo effects, which could make it difficult to show any additional benefit from TMS or DBS, says Burke. If that’s true, this paper may help explain why clinical trials of neurostimulation for depression and other conditions have had such variable results. Separating the placebo component of brain stimulation interventions from their direct impact on brain activity will help in designing studies where the real potential of techniques such as TMS will be more easily quantified, thus improving the effect of treatment protocols.
The findings from this study also suggest broad applications for the placebo effect, says Santarnecchi. “We think this is an important starting point for understanding the placebo effect in general, and learning how to modulate and harness it, including using it as a potential therapeutic tool by intentionally activating brain regions of the placebo network to elicit positive effects on symptoms,” he says. Santarnecchi and his colleagues are currently designing trials that they hope will “disentangle” the effects of brain stimulation from placebo effects and offer insights about how they can be leveraged in clinical settings.
Santarnecchi is an associate professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
This study was supported by funding from the Liu Fu Yu Charity Foundation and
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In a study of vaginal births in New York State hospitals, labor neuraxial analgesia — having an epidural or combined spinal and epidural — was associated with a decreased risk of severe maternal morbidity. Deliveries with a neuraxial analgesic also lessened the risk of post-partum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of preventable severe maternal morbidity, according to the research conducted at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S). The researchers found that a decreased risk of severe maternal morbidity associated with neuraxial analgesia was similar between non-Hispanic White women and racial and ethnic minority women. The results are published online in JAMA Network Open.
Labor neuraxial analgesia — epidural or combined spinal-epidural analgesia is the most effective technique to alleviate labor pain and is used in nearly three-quarters of birthing women in the U.S. As of 2021, postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) was the leading cause of preventable severe maternal morbidity (SMM) and overall maternal mortality. SMM in this study involves 16 maternal complications including heart failure and 5 procedures such as hysterectomy.
“Our goal was to examine the potential benefit of labor neuraxial analgesia in reducing severe maternal morbidity,” said Jean Guglielminotti, MD, PhD, in the Department of Anesthesiology at Columbia P&S, and first author. “The findings indicate that use of labor neuraxial analgesia for vaginal deliveries is associated with a 14% reduction in severe maternal morbidity. Labor neuraxial analgesia may facilitate early evaluation and management of the third stage of labor to avoid escalation of post-partum hemorrhaging into grave complications and death.”
Study results showed that SMM occurred in 7712 women (1.3 percent), of which 2748 (36 percent) had PPH.
Use of neuraxial analgesia for vaginal delivery was associated with a 14 percent decrease in the risk of severe maternal morbidity. The reported incidence of SMM has more than doubled between 1999 and 2017, affecting approximately 1 in 60 women in 2017. Of concern, the risk of SMM is up to a 3-fold increase for racial and ethnic minority women compared with non-Hispanic White women. Therefore, expanding access to and utilization of labor neuraxial analgesia may contribute to improving maternal health outcomes.
To assess the association between labor neuraxial analgesia and SMM, the researchers used data from a large cohort of vaginal deliveries in New York hospitals. The study sample included hospitalizations for vaginal delivery among women aged 15 to 49 years between January 2010, and December 2017. The analysis was limited to New York, as it is the only Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project participating state also providing information on anesthesia care.
During the study period there were 575,524 women with vaginal deliveries. The average age of the women was 28 years, of which 8 percent were non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander, 15 percent were non-Hispanic Black, 18 percent were Hispanic, 45 percent were non-Hispanic White, and 13 percent were of other race and ethnicity.
While approximately 80 percent of non-Hispanic white women receive the analgesia nationwide, 70 percent of non-Hispanic Black women and only 65 percent of Hispanic women receive it. Additionally, about 75 percent of pregnant women with health insurance receive labor neuraxial analgesia but only half of uninsured pregnant women do.
Several intervention programs could help increase access to and utilization of labor neuraxial analgesia, including prenatal maternal education, Medicaid expansions, and in-house obstetric anesthesia teams . “These programs may improve patient participation in clinical decision making and access to care,” observed Guohua Li, MD, DrPH, professor of epidemiology and Anesthesiology at Columbia Mailman School and P&S, and senior author. “Increasing the use of labor neuraxial analgesia among minority women would help narrow the racial and ethnic gap in the utilization of obstetric anesthesia care, likely leading to improvement in maternal health equalities.”
Co-authors are Ruth Landau, Alexander Friedman, and Stanford Chihuri, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons; and Jamie Daw, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

A team of researchers from ICFO and IrsiCaixa report on the development of a low-cost, portable, non-invasive device that uses light and saliva to test Covid-19 patients in less than 30 minutes. The results have shown that the device can detect very low concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 with a sensitivity of 91.2% and a specificity of 90%, similar to that of PCR but as fast as an antigen test.
The breakout of Covid-19 became a game changer in the medical field in 2020. Studies bloomed and steered into full motion to try and find solutions via different paths; on one hand, vaccinations to control the spread of the disease, and on the other hand, seeking for testing techniques that could be available and accessible to everyone around the globe. At the beginning, PCRs were one of the few available techniques capable of providing accurate results, but this technique was expensive and it required specialized personnel and equipment to carry them out. Due to the increasing demand of tests, antigen testing then became an alternative that was much faster and cheaper, but less reliable since it was less sensitive than the former.
In a recent study published in Biomedical Optics Express, ICFO researchers Rubaiya Hussain, Alfredo E. Ongaro, Ewelina Wajs, led by ICREA Prof. Valerio Pruneri, in collaboration with researchers Maria L. Rodriguez De La Concepción, Eva Riveira-Muñoz, Ester Ballana, Julià Blanco, Ruth Toledo, Anna Chamorro, Marta Massanella, Lourdes Mateu, Eulalia Grau, Bonaventura Clotet, led by Jorge Carrillo from IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, have demonstrated and developed a novel technology capable of providing fast and reliable detection of SARS-CoV-2 in saliva samples for COVID-19 testing. The team achieved a detection limit much lower than the antigen tests and when carried out a blind test on more than 50 patients, they obtained results with a sensitivity of 91.2% and a specificity of 90%.
The need
Working daily with COVID-19 patients, Marisa Rodriguez and Jorge Carrillo, researchers at IrsiCaixa, remember that “at the beginning of the pandemic we knew it was really important to detect all those infected individuals in order to control the virus spread. That’s why IrsiCaixa researchers, with Bonaventura Clotet at the helm of the initiative, got together and saw the need to find an alternative to PCR and antigen tests that would combine the advantages of each of them, and that would also detect SARS-CoV-2 infection from saliva samples as it is much simpler and less invasive to obtain for most patients..” With this idea in mind, they contacted ICFO seeking for the technology for light-based imaging and diagnosis devices, developed by Valerio Pruneri’s team. Alfredo Ongaro, ICFO researcher, recalls vividly that “researchers from IrsiCaixa contacted us to see if we could come up with a solution to the problem of testing and provide a new device that could detect SARS-COV-2 from saliva, avoiding painful nasal swab sampling, and achieve accurate results in short time scales, possibly as fast as an antigen test”
A flow virometer
The team developed a flow virometer, a device that uses light to detect the concentration of the virus in a liquid that flows through a very small tube called a microfluidic channel. As Rubaiya Hussain, ICFO researcher, explains “the device uses a couple of drops of saliva and fluorescent light markers. When saliva is collected from the saliva of a patient’s mouth, we introduce it in a solution that contains fluorescent antibodies. If the saliva contains any presence of viral particles, the fluorescent antibodies will attach to the virus.” Then, “the reader collects the sample and sends it into a microfluidic channel that will pass through a laser illumination detection set-up. The laser illuminates the sample and if there is presence of viral particles, they will emit a unique enhancement of the fluorescence signal. In less than 1 minute, the reading translates into peaks in our graph and alerts the system that the sample is a positive.”
The team at ICFO carried out a blind test with 54 samples provided by IrsiCaixa and were able to confirm 31 cases out of 34 positives with only 3 false negatives. In addition, they measured 3834 viral copies per milliliter, which is at least three orders of magnitude lower than that of commercially available rapid antigen tests, meaning that the device is capable of detecting the presence of virus at very low concentration levels.
A device used anywhere, by anyone
Finally, Ewelina Wajs, ICFO researcher, points out that “Our device is very versatile. By selecting proper antibodies, this technology could also be adapted for the detection of other viruses, such as seasonal coronavirus or influenza virus, or even microorganisms in water, such as Legionella and E-coli, with a very fast response time, with respect to gold standards relying on culture.”
The researchers remark that a single device could carry out up to 2000 tests per day. The components that make up the device are low-cost, commercially available off-the-shelf, which allows their large-scale fabrication. In addition, this technique also implies reducing the need of plastic packaging due to massive testing in one device, which favors green environment policies.
Finally, due to its low cost and simple operational design, it could be an excellent solution for diagnosis and spread control in low-income countries where there is limited access to healthcare and vaccines for all the population. The fact that it does not have to be operated by specialized staff or be in a specialized lab could translate in being used for mass screening of the population in crowded places such as restaurants, schools, offices, theatres, and cinemas.