Role of nanotechnology in diagnosing and treating COVID-19 during the Pandemi

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. To date, the virus has infected roughly 5,000,000 people and caused approximately 345,000 deaths worldwide, and these numbers are increasing rapidly. Because of the rapid spread and the rising disease burden, several antiviral drugs and immunomodulators are in clinical trials, but no drugs or vaccines have yet been approved against this deadly pandemic. At present, computed tomography scanning and reverse transcription (RT)-PCR are used to diagnose COVID-19, and nanotechnology is being used to develop drugs against COVID-19. Nanotechnology also plays a role in diagnosing COVID-19. In this article, we discuss the role of nanotechnology in diagnosing and potentially treating COVID-19.

COVID-19 Incidence in Pakistan: Gender Disparity

“…Currently, no antiviral drugs or vaccines are available against COVID-19. The work on vaccine development is in progress in the first stage of clinical trials (10). This disease is treated by different antiviral drugs and sometimes in combination with broad-spectrum antibiotics.…”

COVID-19 transmission, vulnerability, persistence and nanotherapy: a review

“…Due to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, fast and accurate diagnostic tools are instantly required to screen COVID-19 patients and confirm the positive cases (Abdul et al 2020 ). The common and mostly used bio-molecular based diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 are nucleic acid detection by real-time-Polymerase Chain Reaction using quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (rt-PCR/qPCR), various isothermal amplification such as loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), rolling circle amplification, nucleic acid sequence based amplification (NASBA) etc.…”

“…Therefore, nanotechnology and nanobiosenors can play a major role in producing scalable and inexpensive detection methods (Roy, Malode et al, Purohit, Kumar et al 2019 , Mahapatra, Baranwal et al 2020 , Shetti, Malode et al 2020 ). Nano-biosensors can be used as a challenging point of care diagnostic tools even before symptoms have been shown in patients with very low viral loads (Abdul et al 2020 ). Zhu et al ( 2020 ) stated a new study about optical bio-nanosensor that can detect the coronavirus in ~ 30 min directly from patient’s samples without needing centralized laboratory tests.…”

Zinc-Based Nanomaterials for Diagnosis and Management of Plant Diseases: Ecological Safety and Future Prospects

“…The green synthesized (microbial/plant cell extract-derived) nanoparticles particularly silver [ 98 ] and gold nanoparticles [ 99 ] or their composites [ 98 ] have been documented to exhibit virus-neutralizing or -inhibiting properties. Likewise, the role of zinc nanomaterials for the virostatic effect [ 100 ], virus neutralization, and for immune-modulatory significance against the emerging COVID-19 causative agent [ 101 ] has been well identified.…”