Innovative Diagnostics for Emerging Infectious Diseases

Emerging infectious diseases are abrupt threats that can be very severe to global health. It is sudden and most of the time the first of their kind, and in no time they tend to be highly uncontrolled. Most of the emerging diseases that have appeared after a long time remain of the highest concern. COVID-19. 

For example, Zika virus, Nipah virus, and many other bacterial and viral infections are some of the most common, not only because of their high rate of transmission but also because of their evolving nature in the development of resistivity against the already existing treatments. There could not have been a time when the need for quick, accurate, and reliable diagnostic devices was greater. 

Novel diagnostic approaches enable new devices today that diagnose and monitor these conditions and are at the forefront of fighting infectious diseases. This, therefore, places early diagnosis at a weighted point where health care providers have a chance to try and trace the spread of an infection by implementing inherently efficient control mechanisms. The paper will illustrate new trends in diagnostic technologies that are giving new hope to the future of infectious disease control.

Nanotechnology and Diagnostics

Nanotechnology has also been one of the most relevant fields in recent years for diagnosing and controlling re-emerging infectious diseases. For instance, magnetic nanosensors have been most promising in the detection of viruses and pathogens. Nanosensors take advantage of the specific characteristics conferred on the material properties of magnetic nanomaterials to help increase their sensitivity and specific percentages in diagnostic testing.

Further, several applications have been developed for magnetic nanosensors, including their detection performance in SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Integration of magnetic nanosensing strategies with point-of-care diagnostic kits thus enabled the researcher to revise a device that is easy to use, portable, and yet capable of generating test results in an hour or less, even in resource-limited settings. Nanotechnology and its applications in developing biosensors proceed much faster, which shall not be discussed here in detail. Quantum dots have unconventional optical structures and have, therefore, greatly exploded in the development of biosensors.

It thus aids in the detection of even the smallest amount of nucleic acid, proteins, or other biomarkers that are indicators of infectious diseases. These nanomaterial-based diagnostics are one step further toward this aim, enabling the multiplexing detection or holding of multiplex testing for more than one target in just one single essay. This result will not only allow the medical practitioner to get better insight into a patient’s condition other than malaria but also treat the right patients accordingly. This would rather apply in the case of co-infections, whereby a number of pathogens can be involved. Another frontier in the diagnosis of emerging infectious diseases is the use of electrochemical biosensors, which has brought a considerable reduction in the complexity and cost of diagnostic tests, hence making the diagnosis of formidable infectious diseases amenable to wider use. Basically, electrochemical biosensors work through biochemical interactions between some target analytic and a sensor element that reduce an electrical signal.

Yearwise Publication Trend on emerging infectious diseases

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Probably the most visible progress has been in DNA/RNA electrochemical biosensing devices, although they are under evaluation as an alternative to classical PCR.

The advantages of such sensors are the reduced time and cost involved in carrying out the tests; hence, the need for bulky and sophisticated equipment to be run by specially trained operators in a laboratory is obviated for field applications of the developed technologies. The amplification strategies for the signal provide high sensitivities, resulting in a measurement performance that detects trace concentrations of nucleic acids. This can be very important since the pathogen concentration during the period of infection may be low and challenging to identify by any conventional technique. Equally important to note is that electrochemical biosensors were not only used in the detection of different viral infections. Electrochemical biosensors have been developed for identifying bacterial pathogens, notably Yersinia enterocolitica, responsible for a wide range of gastrointestinal-based pathologies.

In these sensors, the graphene quantum dots act as enzyme mimics instead of the costly reagents used in conventional sensors. The detection of Yersinia with high sensitivity and specificity is achieved by such sensors even in the most complicated biological samples like food and human serum. This is therefore a huge stride in the area of food safety and medical analysis, which need the fastest and real-time detection of hazardous bacteria.

Point-of-Care Diagnostics and Portable Devices

The increasing demand for speed has been accelerated by the development of point-of-care diagnostic devices that provide instant testing and results without any central laboratory. These devices have turned out to be pivotal during outbreaks, when immediate diagnosis can mean the difference between containment and wide transmission.

Tests such as the Trevion Easy Check COVID-19 IgM/IgG Lateral Flow Device are gaining huge popularity in the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a rapid test for detecting the presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 within a few minutes. It has been well-tested in validation studies for both sensitivity and specificity, showing overall accuracy with the gold standard. The ability of the Easy Check device to produce quick, accurate, simple, and reliable results lifted it to become one of the finest tools for monitoring and mass screening in a region where laboratory infrastructure is either poor or not available. Parallel to the development of antibody tests, much potential lies in portable nucleic acid detection platforms.

This is possible owing to the integration of advanced technologies, such as nanopore sequencing and plasmatic biosensing, into those diagnostic tools that have enabled molecular testing in the field. For example, this has been shown to be the case in outbreaks of infection. met genomic nanopore sequencing has been used in pathogen identification and tracking in the 2018 Lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria. These portable devices are important in providing genomic data in real-time, thus giving public health officials a chance to make responsive, time-informed measures and decisions to keep outbreaks under control and manage them better.

Innovations in Biomarker Detection

The identification and detection of specific biomarkers are very critical to the successful diagnosis of infectious diseases that express themselves with rather nonspecific symptoms. Bio-sensing technologies have advanced so far through the development of very sensitive and specific sensors for the various biomarkers of infection by viruses, bacteria, and parasites.

It involves new developments in aptamer-based electrochemical sensors that are flexible and stable for the detection of diagnostic biomarkers.

The sensors are equipped with nucleic acid ligands for selective binding to target molecules, and these are called aptamers. Such sensitivity has been further enhanced when combined with enzymes like glucose dehydrogenase; for example, a biomarker of this type can now be detected at very low concentrations. This technology has already been exploited for detection related to vascular endothelial growth factor, a biomarker for a wide range of diseases, from cancer to infectious diseases. Other developing technologies are classified as label-free capacitive biosensors, which measure dielectric changes in the properties of a sample caused by the presence of a target analytic. Such sensors have been developed for detecting Cryptosporidium oocysts in samples of water, and they represent a rapid, cost-effective method for monitoring water cleanliness to prevent an epidemic caused by water-borne microbes.

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The Future of Diagnostic Technologies

Added to this is the fact that the environment for infectious diseases is never constant. Hence, innovation in diagnosing these should never lie behind in a state of stagnation. Some of these solutions now integrate advanced materials like nanomaterials and biomolecules, and they have been combined on traditional diagnosis platforms that allow extreme improvements in the sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic tests while maintaining portability. However, much remains to be done.

Innovations in the future would then most likely be in the direction of better multiplexing abilities in diagnostic tests. In this scenario, multiple pathogens and biomarkers could be detected in one go. In cases of co-infections and complex diseases, a single test may be incomplete. Moreover, it will mean more hardened and scaled-up manufacturing processes are required to make these diagnostics available to the populations most in need.

Certainly, the COVID-19 crisis that has unfolded sets the epitome for international collaboration and the sharing of information in fighting communicable diseases. The development of new diagnostics must be matched by investment in standards for their evaluation and deployment. into practice so these technologies can be effectively brought into public health strategies across the globe with speed.

Conclusion

Diagnostics is naturally developing very fast due to a host of emerging infectious diseases that need urgently addressed. Next-generation technology in nanotechnology-based sensors, electrochemical biosensors, and portable diagnostic devices will enhance present testing capabilities in terms of accuracy, speed, and accessibility. These are advances that facilitate the identification and management of existing infective threats and lay some groundwork on how to respond in the future to global health crises. In fact, plan-funded research is promising, for the most part, a very bright future for diagnostics, as this bar continues to be set with regard to what might one day be possible in terms of public health improvement and outbreak avoidance from further infectious diseases.

References

  1. Wu, K., Saha, R., Su, D., Krishna, V.D., Liu, J., Cheeran, M.C.J. and Wang, J.P., 2020. Magnetic-nanosensor-based virus and pathogen detection strategies before and during COVID-19. ACS Applied Nano Materials3(10), pp.9560-9580.
  2. Santhanam, M., Algov, I. and Alfonta, L., 2020. DNA/RNA electrochemical biosensing devices a future replacement of PCR methods for a fast epidemic containment. Sensors20(16), p.4648.
  3. Savas, S. and Altintas, Z., 2019. Graphene quantum dots as nanozymes for electrochemical sensing of Yersinia enterocolitica in milk and human serum. Materials12(13), p.2189.
  4. Chan, C.W., Shahul, S., Coleman, C., Tesic, V., Parker, K. and Yeo, K.T.J., 2021. Evaluation of the truvian easy check COVID-19 IgM/IgG lateral flow device for rapid anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection. American Journal of Clinical Pathology155(2), pp.286-295.
  5. Kafetzopoulou, L.E., Pullan, S.T., Lemey, P., Suchard, M.A., Ehichioya, D.U., Pahlmann, M., Thielebein, A., Hinzmann, J., Oestereich, L., Wozniak, D.M. and Efthymiadis, K., 2019. Metagenomic sequencing at the epicenter of the Nigeria 2018 Lassa fever outbreak. Science363(6422), pp.74-77.
  6. Lee, J., Tatsumi, A., Tsukakoshi, K., Wilson, E.D., Abe, K., Sode, K. and Ikebukuro, K., 2020. Application of a glucose dehydrogenase-fused with zinc finger protein to label DNA aptamers for the electrochemical detection of VEGF. Sensors20(14), p.3878.
  7. Zhang, R., Rejeeth, C., Xu, W., Zhu, C., Liu, X., Wan, J., Jiang, M. and Qian, K., 2019. Label-free electrochemical sensor for CD44 by ligand-protein interaction. Analytical chemistry91(11), pp.7078-7085.

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