(360f) A Novel Microreactor Technology for Detection of COVID-19 Using Exhaled Breath

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 outbreak caused by SARS-Cov-2 a pandemic in March 2020. The ongoing crisis has caused over 761 million infections and 6.88 million deaths globally, as of 28 March 2023. Rapid screening and diagnosis of COVID-19 is an urgent need since the virus is highly contagious. Currently, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is considered as the gold standard for screening and diagnosis of COVID-19 infection. However, the nasal/throat swabs required for RT-PCR is very uncomfortable and takes 2 to 3 days for providing the results, and sometimes leads to false negatives. Breath analysis has attracted much attention because of its wide application in health diagnosis, metabolite bioinformatics and drug discover, which offers a rapid, and non-invasive detection. In April 2022, FDA authorized the first COVID-19 diagnostic test based on analysis of volatile organic compounds in exhaled breath samples. In this work, we developed a technique using a silicon microreactor for selective capture carbonyl compounds in exhaled breath and using ultra high- performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS) for the identification. We collected exhaled breath from COVID-19 positive and negative patients based on PCR results and using several statistical models to determine the biomarkers to differentiate between positive and negative COVID-19 patients.