Respiration monitoring
is important for evaluating human health.
Humidity sensing is a promising way to establish a relationship between
human respiration and electrical signal. This work describes polymer
humidity sensors with ultrafast response for respiration monitoring.
The humidity-sensitive polyelectrolyte is in situ cross-linked on the substrate printed with interdigitated electrodes
by a thiol–ene click reaction. The polyelectrolyte humidity
sensor shows rapid water adsorption/desorption ability, excellent
stability, and repeatability. The sensor with ultrafast response and
recovery (0.29/0.47 s) when changing humidity between 33 and 95% shows
good application prospects in breath monitoring and touchless sensing.
Different respiration patterns can be distinguished, and the breath
rate/depth of detection subjects can also be determined by the sensor.
In addition, the obtained sensor can sense the skin evaporation in
a noncontact way.
Motivation
Since December 2019, the newly identified coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has caused a massive health crisis worldwide and resulted in over 70 000 COVID-19 infections so far. Clinical drugs targeting SARS-CoV-2 are urgently needed to decrease the high fatality rate of confirmed COVID-19 patients. Traditional de novo drug discovery needs more than 10 years, so drug repurposing seems the best option currently to find potential drugs for treating COVID-19.
Results
Compared with traditional non-covalent drugs, covalent drugs have attracted escalating attention recent years due to their advantages in potential specificity upon careful design, efficiency and patient burden. We recently developed a computational protocol named as SCAR (steric-clashes alleviating receptors) for discovering covalent drugs. In this work, we used the SCAR protocol to identify possible covalent drugs (approved or clinically tested) targeting the main protease (3CLpro) of SARS-CoV-2. We identified 11 potential hits, among which at least six hits were exclusively enriched by the SCAR protocol. Since the preclinical or clinical information of these identified drugs is already available, they might be ready for being clinically tested in the treatment of COVID-19.
Contact
senliu.ctgu@gmail.com
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.