It’s safe to say that human life is hugely layered. At every stage, these layers interact with each other under some capacity to guide us through situations in a productive manner. Now, such a setup might look straightforward, but it actually deals with a lot of complications along the way. You see, the whole thing needs to be carried out in a certain manner, a manner which talks to forces like creativity and convenience. Over the years, we have come up with several attempts to crack this code. Some have worked sensationally, while some were quick to fall flat on their face.. Nevertheless, one that can be deemed symbolic of our potential as a society is technology. Right from the get-go, technology perfectly understood the assignment of nurturing our growth, and that showed up well in the way it went about everything. For instance, we were suddenly playing around with methodologies more advanced than anything we had seen before. As you can guess, if you are functioning within said setup, the by-products are always going to be fascinating. In technology’s case, this is testified by all the major sectors out there. One testimony to stick out, however, is from our healthcare sector. While other areas saw their operations scale up on the back of technology’s arrival, the medical sphere goes out to credit it for what was a complete identity reconstruction. Since making those first right noises, the medtech collaboration has come a long way. In fact, it’s set to add another feather in the cap.
The researching team at Duke University has successfully devised a test for providing data over how effective your antibodies are in terms of neutralizing Covid 19 and all its variants. In a pandemic-ridden world, it’s important to gauge your immunity levels, and the Duke University’s brainchild achieves that in the most effortless way possible. Named as Covid-19 Variant Spike-ACE2-Competitive Antibody Neutralization assay (CoVariant-SCAN), the test, in practice, makes ACE2 proteins detach and bind to spike proteins, thus projecting a measurable fluorescent glow. However, in the presence of neutralizing antibodies, the binding won’t be facilitated. The chain reaction here would be an alteration in the fluorescent signal, as well as proxy measurement of antibody efficacy.
“It only took us a week or two to incorporate the Delta variant in our test, and it could easily be expanded to also include the Omicron variant. All we need is the spike protein of this variant, which many groups across the world – including our group at Duke – are feverishly working to produce,” said Ashutosh Chilkoti, a researcher involved in the study.
According to the reports available right now, the new test only takes 15 minutes to complete.
