https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(20...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(20)30559-4/fulltext#seccesectitle0003

A breath of fresh air – the potential for COVID-19 breath diagnostics

While still a very new approach, there are benefits to considering breath testing for SARS-CoV-2 infections. When coupled with several of the near-real-time VOC detectors that are under development or recently available, it may provide a quick test – potentially yielding results in minutes, before a subject has left the testing area. This could lead to higher quarantine compliance and limit community spread, as there is no latency lag-time for asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals. While the promise of vaccine deployment is tantalizingly close, it is clear that society will need to continue to test for SARS-CoV-2 infections for some time. These rapid breath-based tests could be a key part of the international response strategy. Breath analysis research teams need to collectively meet this global need.



https://research.ucdavis.edu/sensit/

UC Davis Licenses Technology for Miniaturized System That Can Detect Chemicals With High Specificity and Sensitivity

“We see valuable opportunities to apply this technology to problems in defense and security, food and agriculture, process engineering and health care,” said Tom Turpen, president and CEO of SensIT. Potential applications enabled by the technology include detecting explosives, plant diseases and environmental triggers for asthma.

Davis is a professor in the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an expert in chemical sensing. She has developed innovations that range from a “breathalyzer” that can detect the health of dolphins to a noninvasive way to detect citrus greening, a plant disease that can devastate citrus crops.