Media coverage
1
Media coverage
Title Nanomaterial testing breakthroughs set to boost pandemic resilience Degree of recognition Local Media name/outlet PolyU Vibrant@FENG eNewsletter Issue 4 Media type Web Country/Territory Hong Kong Date 6/04/23 Description Humanity had a lucky escape with COVID-19 — a more deadly microbe, like a mutated Ebola, Avian influenza, Marburg, or MERS-CoV virus, all potential causes of the next pandemic, could have produced a far higher death toll.
But given recent advances like messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, and the development of nanomaterial-based optical techniques to speedily detect SARS-CoV-2 at an early stage by PolyU’s Professor Mo YANG, Associate Head and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr Siu Hong Dexter WONG, Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, the world is better prepared to tackle future infectious threats.
Testing times
Yang and Wong’s work on advanced biosensors, completed over a year during the COVID-19 pandemic, applies nanomaterials to nucleic acid detection, and promises to improve upon the performance of today’s testing gold standard, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method.
“PCR tests for COVID-19 usually require very complex handling processes in terms of the RNA harvesting, which involves laboratory work of four to six hours,” says WONG. “Our solutions’ greatest advantages are they have fewer steps, reducing the wait to around one hour, and lowering the risk of false positive signals. Also, they can detect the level of infection.”
Testing is a vital tool for managing pandemics as it enables the identification of infected individuals and helps prevent the pathogen’s spread. It provides information for public health officials to determine the outbreak’s extent and make informed decisions on how to prioritize resources.
Also, quickly identifying individuals who have been in close contact with an infected person and providing them with the appropriate care can limit the severity and spread.
Conventional nucleic acid detection techniques like PCR often require Förster resonant energy transfer (FRET), which relies on the transfer of energy from a donor (fluorophore) to an acceptor (quencher). However, high background signals can lower the sensitivity of these techniques.
Yang and Wong’s AIEgen/graphene oxide nanocomposite (AIEgen@GO)-based two-stage “turn-on” nucleic acid biosensor for the rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 viral sequence deploys graphene oxide nanosheets to reduce background signals, thereby increasing sensitivity. When the AIEgen@GO meets target viral sequences, the AIEgen detaches from GO for the fluorescent recovery and is lighted up to achieve a dual-on mechanism to maximize the detection sensitivity.
mts-biosensor-1
"We want to decrease the background by applying these nanomaterials to raise sensitivity,” says WONG. "The overall improvement of these technologies is better capacity in terms of sensitivity.”
A key challenge in creating the platform was determining the best ratio between the graphene and the agent, which took several months to overcome. The result is a platform that “can be modified to detect any type of nucleic acid,” adds WONG.URL https://www.polyu.edu.hk/feng/publications/vibrant/issue-4/major-theme-stories/#collapse-1 Persons Siu Hong Wong, Mo Yang