Rapid and Accurate On-Site Immunodiagnostics of Highly Contagious Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Using Portable Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering-Lateral Flow Assay Reader
Younju Joung, Kihyun Kim, Seung‐Woo Lee, Byung-Seon Chun, Sang-Yeop Lee, Joonki Hwang, Suji Choi, Taejoon Kang, Mi‐Kyung Lee, Lingxin Chen, Jaebum Choo
Abstract
In early 2022, the number of people infected with the highly contagious mutant severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), called Omicron, was increasing worldwide. Therefore, several countries approved the lateral flow assay (LFA) strip as a diagnostic method for confirming SARS-CoV-2 instead of reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which takes a long time to generate the results. However, owing to the limitation of detection sensitivity, commercial LFA strips have high false-negative diagnosis rates for patients with low virus concentrations. Therefore, in this study, we developed a portable surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-LFA reader based on localized surface plasmon effects to solve the sensitivity problem of the commercial LFA strip. We tested 54 clinical samples using this portable SERS-LFA reader, which generated 49 positive and 5 negative results. Out of the 49 positive results, SERS-LFA classified only 2 as false negative, while the commercial LFA classified 21 as false negative. This confirmed that the false-negative rate had significantly improved compared to that of commercial LFA strips. We believe that the proposed SERS-LFA system can be utilized as a point-of-care diagnostic system to quickly and accurately determine a virus infection that could spread significantly within a short period.