Viral infections represent a major health threat to humankind. We will present a new detection technology which has the means to potentially provide an instant detection of many viruses. We engineered biosensors that assemble into active enzyme in the presence of viral surface proteins from HIV, Influenza and SARS-CoV-2. Given the current need for diagnostic tools for SARS-CoV-2, we focused our efforts in optimizing our approach to achieve the high sensitivity required to detect SARS-CoV-2 clinically. We validated our detection method using the saliva samples from COVID-19 patients. Our approach is well-suited to substantially reduce the complexity and improve the scalability for the point-of-care diagnostics of infectious diseases.

Support from the NIH RADX Award: U54HL119145 is gratefully acknowledged.