People’s Daily Health Client Reporter Wang Aibing
“If our research can be applied to the clinic in the future, it will have many advantages. First of all, compared with the current nucleic acid test, this method can detect results more quickly; In terms of the applied antigen detection, the detection accuracy of this method is higher.” Yin Hao, a professor at the Medical Department of Wuhan University, told a reporter from the People’s Daily Health Client.
Recently, Nature Biomedical Engineering (“Nature Biomedical Engineering”) published an online publication of Professor Yin Hao from the Medical Research Institute of Wuhan University, the Medical Research Institute of Zhongnan Hospital, and the Frontier Science Center for Immunity and Metabolism of the Ministry of Education. The latest achievements of Professor Zhang Ying’s research group in the field of new coronavirus nucleic acid detection: The research group has developed a nucleic acid detection method with high sensitivity, high specificity, convenient operation and rapidity.
Wuhan University R&D team, photo courtesy of the interviewee.
The detection rate meets basic requirements
“If this test method can be applied in the future, it still needs to be sampled through a normal throat swab or nasal swab, but our test is different from the current customary method. We only It takes about 2 minutes to lyse these samples, and then put these samples into the detection reagent, and a conclusion can be drawn in 20 minutes.” Yin Hao introduced that our detection method does not require the use of professional instruments, and can meet the needs of Basic testing needs.
It is understood that the research group named the non-classical PAM-mediated one-step detection technology as sPAMC (for suboptimal PAM of Cas12a-based test with enhanced flexibility, speed, sensitivity, and reproducibility). And apply sPAMC to real sample detection of 2019-nCoV. The researchers tested a total of 204 throat swab samples. Among the 104 RT-qPCR positive samples, sPAMC could be detected in 98, and the remaining 100 negative samples were not detected, which proved that sPAMC had 94.2% detection. rate and no false positives.
“The detection rate of 94.2% can already meet routine needs, because the current detection rate of antigen testing is in the early 80s, while the detection rate of nucleic acid testing is required to be higher than 90%. , so our detection rate of 94.2% is a data that can meet the standard in the laboratory stage.” Yin Hao explained that there are still some steps to go, and they can be put into the clinic after they are completed.
2 years of research, hoping to apply to specific scenarios
“The research started in 2020.” Yin Hao recalled that we have always believed that there will be many application scenarios in the future, such as confined spaces, airports, railway stations and other places Doing a rapid test can even be applied to the detection of other respiratory viruses.
“If you follow the normal process, it will take more than a year to really invest in the clinic, and it will take 9 months at the earliest.” Yin Hao said expectantly, we It is also hoped that this research can be more quickly commercialized and applied to more scenarios in need.
