Internet of medical things-enabled CRISPR diagnostics for rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have highlighted CRISPR-based nucleic acid detection as rapid and sensitive diagnostic methods for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Here, we reported an optimized CRISPR-Cas12a diagnostic platform for the safe and rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs). This platform, which was referred to as CALIBURN-v2, could complete the diagnosis on extracted RNA samples within 25 min in a closed-lid reaction mode and had 100-fold increase in detection sensitivity in comparison with previous platforms. Most importantly, by integrating a portable device and smartphone user interface, CALIBURN-v2 allowed for cloud server-based data collection and management, thus transforming the point-of-care testing (POCT) platform to internet of medical things (IoMT) applications. It was found that IoMT-enabled CALIBURN-v2 could achieve 95.56% (172 out of 180) sensitivity for SARS-CoV-2 wild type and 94.38% (84 out of 89) overall sensitivity for SARS-CoV-2 variants including Delta and Omicron strains. Therefore, our study provides a feasible approach for IoMT-enabled CRISPR diagnostics for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 VOCs.