State-of-the-Art of Nanodiagnostics and Nanotherapeutics against SARS-CoV-2

Abstract

The pandemic outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, with millions of infected patients worldwide, has severely challenged all aspects of public health. In this regard, early and rapid detection of infected cases and providing effective therapeutics against the virus are in urgent demand. Along with conventional clinical protocols, nanomaterial-based diagnostics and therapeutics hold a great potential against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Indeed, nanoparticles with their outstanding characteristics would render additional advantages to the current approaches for rapid and accurate diagnosis and also developing prophylactic vaccines or antiviral therapeutics. In this review, besides presenting an overview of the coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2, we discuss the introduced nanomaterial-based detection assays and devices and also antiviral formulations and vaccines for coronaviruses.

Ultra-sensitive and fast optical detection of the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 using AgNPs/SiNWs nanohybrid based sensors

“…The Spike trimers were the core component that invades the host cells with ACE-2. The remarkable feature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is its higher mutability and fast transmission rates which could pose great challenges to detect as well as cure the infections [ 3 , 4 ]. To ease the situation, Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and Real-time reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) standalone as foremost diagnostic tools which involves the extraction of RNA to confirm the positive cases which takes almost more than 5-6 hrs [ 5 , 6 ].…”

Mix-and-read, one-minute SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic assay: development of PIFE-based aptasensor

“…2,5 Most antigen tests for SARS-CoV-2 detection use a conventional immunochromatographic lateral flow assay (LFA) format with immobilized coated SARS-CoV-2 anti-bodies serving as detecting agents and colloidal gold or other visible dyes as indicators. [9][10][11] However, the colorimetric LFA detection methods often come with lower sensitivity (5 ng mL À1 ) 12 with high false-negative results, proving them clinically insufficient. 13,14 LFA format can be coupled with alternative detecting methods such as surface-enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) to lead to enhanced performance, but detecting SERS requires the use of advanced, specialized and costly equipment.…”

Carbon dots for virus detection and therapy

“…A common approach to detecting the presence of viruses in biological samples is to use inorganic nanoparticles for single-shot analyses, which are usually solution-based assays performed in a cuvette or a microtiter plate and paper-based lateral flow assays (LFAs). Silver and gold nanoparticles functionalized with protein or nucleic acid probes are ideal for assays with colorimetric detection of viral markers due to their plasmonic properties, while another option is to use them for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) [63]. In addition, fluorescencebased assays can be designed using, for example, nanoparticles doped with lanthanide chelates or semiconductor QDs [64].…”