By Kathleen Berger, Executive Producer for Science and Technology
A team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis has developed an indoor air quality monitor to identify infectious diseases in a public space, starting with the detection of COVID-19. The device they created could detect if someone in a room or wing of a building is infected. It’s a real-time pathogen air quality monitor that can detect COVID-19 viral particles an infected person is shedding in about 5 minutes!
“Airborne respiratory virus detection in aerosol science,” said Rajan Chakrabarty, PhD, the Harold D. Jolley Career Development associate professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering. “Using our device, even if you have one person in a standard classroom shedding (viral particles), it will take between three to five minutes to detect it, using the biosensor.”
John Cirrito, PhD, professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, reached out to Chakrabarty about COVID-19 transmission and detection. It was early in the pandemic. Cirrito did some digging, found Chakrabarty and sent him an email.
“So when you receive an email from someone at the medical school with the word ‘aerosol’, you kind of immediately feel like responding to that person because here’s someone who seems to get the point,” said Chakrabarty. “I immediately responded, and then the whole show started.”
Cirrito’s lab already had the biosensor needed to get the ball rolling.
“We had a great biosensor for Alzheimer’s disease that we knew could detect proteins very quickly,” said Cirrito. “And we had the idea, can we convert this for something for COVID instead.”
“It’s probably the world’s most sensitive biosensor, which can go down to 10s of viral RNA copies in one cubic meter of air,” said Chakrabarty.
So, Chakrabarty’s lab created the pathogen air quality monitor in collaboration with Cirrito and Carla M. Yuede, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine. The device has been tested in indoor spaces.
“The results are looking really positive,” said Yuede.
“We can detect down to the 10s of viral particles in a sample. We can sample indoor space every five minutes,” explained Cirrito. “And then read that every five minutes on our biosensor to see whether virus is present or not.”
The biosensor is an adaptation of an Alzheimer’s disease-related technology that Cirrito and Yuede developed a decade ago.
“Transferring what we knew about creating electrochemical biosensors for Alzheimer’s disease to make it specific to COVID,” said Yuede.
“From the aerosol side, the challenge was how do we facilitate the collection of the air and simultaneous detection in a liquid medium, which is what the biosensor is used for detection,” said Chakrabarty. “We were able to come up with a device, a sampling technique, which can pull in air at such a high-flow rate, and simultaneously trap all the particles with such high efficiency, that ‘that’ was innovation in itself.”
The biosensor is integrated into an air sampler that operates based on wet cyclone technology. The wet cyclone sampler has an automated pump that collects the fluid and sends it to the biosensor for seamless detection of the virus using electrochemistry.
“So, it’s essentially a phase change which takes place from air to a liquid medium, a real-time detection device for COVID,” said Chakrabarty.
They hope it will be ready for public use later in 2024. The team is creating the capabilities, not the policies.
“There’s a lot of places this could be used,” Cirrito said. “There’s going to be some places that don’t want to know.”
The types of indoor spaces can be public or private, such as hospitals, schools, office buildings and airports. It would be available to anyone.
“Almost from the beginning, we work with a company, Y2X Life Sciences, that has an option to license the technology,” said Cirrito. “We work with them from the beginning on the idea of how do we commercialize this, how do we get this to market.”
“We’re also trying to expand this to detect other targets,” said Yuede. “Any other antibody that we can develop and attach to these chip-based electrodes.”
”It can detect multiple viruses all in the same five minutes with air quality monitor,” said Cirrito. “And there’s a lot of other options – bacteria or fungus. It’s not just specific for viruses.”
“The next phase of this study would be in large open spaces. To directly connect or hook up this device into the HVAC system,” said Chakrabarty.“Even if there is a trace quantity of virus suspended in air, it will immediately detect it. If there is a likelihood of outbreak, as detected by this device, then they need to take action.”
