2021 BRN Discussion, page-394

The following article has been posted as a link before but it is interesting to revisit for the following reasons:
1. The article is from August, 2020 and the reported accuracy was then 92%.

2. By November 2020 when Peter van der Made presented to BIC the reported accuracy had improved to 94%

3. When Rob Telson published his second perspectives article earlier this year 2021 the accuracy had improved to 98.7%.

4. The feature which Brainchip have promoted to shareholders that makes AKIDA technology unique in all the world is the ability to incrementally learn
points 1. to 3. above shows this in action. This improved accuracy rate logically means that the already state of the art false positive rate has been reduced.

5. The current state of the art PCR test returned in August, 2020 according to the article 25% false positives if this is correct unlike AKIDA it will today still be returning 25% false positives and tomorrow and the next day as it does not like AKIDA technology have the ability to act intelligently and learn.

6. Professor Haick who receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation expects that approval will be accelerated because of Covid-19 and that it could be as early as 6 months from when he is being interviewed in August, 2020.

7. Professor Haick is reported as stating "The tests should cost around $2 to $3 a person.

8. Professor Haick added "The self-contained device does not require any additional accessories."

All of the above points are in my opinion relevant to consider however I invite you to take particular note of point 7 and point 8 in the context of the recent press release confirming that Brainchip and NaNose are working together and if you put the NaNose sensors together with the AKD1000 you get a "self-contained device" that "does not require any additional accessories."

MY OPINION ONLY DYOR.

New breath test sniffs out Covid-19 in 30 seconds

Breath test from Technion scientist shows promisingearly results in sniffing out Covid-19 within 30 seconds.

By Brian Blum AUGUST24, 2020, 7:00 AM

Could uncomfortable nasal swabs beswapped for a contactless two-second breathalyzer puff to check for Covid-19infection? Prof. Hossam Haick thinks so.

Haick, a professor of chemical engineering and nanotechnology at theTechnion – Israel Institute of Technology, first came to our attention in 2011for his invention of “NaNose,” which can sniff out cancer, Parkinson’s andAlzheimer’s disease, gastric ailments and more. (Na-Nose is currently beingassessed by medical regulators.)

When Covid-19 broke out earlier this year, Haick, together with Technioncolleague Dr. Yoav Broza, together with researchers from Wuhan, China, beganadapting Haick’s “breathalyzer” technology for the novel coronavirus.

The preliminary results look promising.

In a new peer-reviewed study published in the scientific journal ACS Nano, Haick’s sniffer tech correctly identified all positive patients in aclinical trial in Wuhan. The test detects disease-specific biomarkers in thebreath with 92% accuracy, 100% sensitivity and 84% specificity, the researchersreported.

The new device, like the original, uses nanotechnology to identifyspecific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the lung that are in theexhaled breath of coronavirus patients.

The Covid-19 breathalyzer could revolutionize testing for the virus –you just need to blow into the device for a couple of seconds from a distanceof 2 centimeters and the results come back within 30 seconds.

Fast identification of Covid-positive patients is crucial for contacttracing and is considered the best way, short of a vaccine, to stem communitytransmission of the virus that has killed more than 800,000 people around theworld.

A less invasive system would also make Covid testing more widespread,enabling health departments to identify pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers.

The tests should cost around $2 to $3 a person, Haick added. Theself-contained device does not require any additional accessories.

The clinical trial examined 140 people, of whom 49 had previously testedpositive for Covid-19. The test identified all the coronavirus carriers.However, it also told seven healthy people they had the virus.

That may sound like a failure, but up to a quarter of currentstate-of-the-art PCR tests for Covid-19 return false positives as well. Fromthe perspective of doctors tackling the pandemic, false positives areinconvenient but less concerning than false negatives, which can lead to peopleto assume they are virus-free and as a result spread the virus by mistake.

Like NaNose Medical’s main cancer testing device, its Covid-19 test willalso need to be approved by regulators, but Haick expects that to happen fastergiven the urgency of Covid-19 testing – perhaps as early as six months fromnow, he says. Still, a larger cohort study will be needed to validate theresults.