Virginia Tech researchers developing portable COVID tests
VIRGINIA (DC News Now) — Imagine being able to walk into a crowded store, restaurant or even movie theater and be able to detect if there’s COVID-19 in the air.
It could be a reality in just a few years as a team at Virginia Tech is developing what is essentially a portable rapid test for the air.
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The project’s lead researched, Dr. Linsey Marr, a distinguished professor and civil and environmental engineer, said the idea is that people would be able to carry the tests in their backpacks and purses,
“If you think you might be in a risky situation, you could run the test and then shortly thereafter, know whether there is maybe a lot of virus in the air and that you should either maybe get out of there soon, put on a mask or take other measures to reduce the amount of virus in the air,” she said.
Marr said to use the test, the first step would be to collect an air sample.
“We’re doing that in a way that doesn’t require fancy pumps or any power,” she said.
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People would take a “big bag,” wave it around the air to capture a “big mass of air,” roll up the bag and squeeze the air through a filter.
“The device is like a rapid test for the air,” Marr said. “The filter actually contains a piece of a surgical mask. You then take that piece of surgical and put it into a little bit of a liquid that has gold in a particles and other things in it and then you would drip that onto something like a rapid test, which if the virus is there, it’ll show you a ideally show you a colored line.”
Marr said the device may still take a few years before it is available in stores, but she feels when it’s ready, it will be a game changer.
“Because you’d be able to walk into a place and then know within 15 minutes am I at risk for getting COVID 19? Or we could develop this for other diseases too, and that would really give us the type of information that we just don’t have right now. We’re really blind to what our risk is in any given space,” she said.
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Marr said this is an exciting project because of the far-ranging implications it could have.
“This has been a dream of ours, actually, from more than 10 years ago. We started working on something like this for a flu virus and we kind of got stuck. But obviously with the pandemic coming along, it kind of added urgency to this type of problem,” Marr said. “People can go buy it off store shelf and then walk into a place and assess the risk pretty easily.”
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