"Our team had previously shown how reactive oxygen species (ROS) can be used to diagnose lung diseases," said Dr. Mohammad Abdolahad, head of an Iranian knowledge-based company, “but we recently discovered that ROS increase in sputum can be considered as an indicator of infection with SARS-CoV-2”. While describing the advantages of this method of diagnosis, he added: "the level of ROS in patients infected with the virus changes even when a patient is asymptomatic. Therefore, by measuring ROS levels, we can diagnose the presence of the virus. An increase in ROS levels can be attributed to two factors; the body's inflammatory function against the presence of the virus, as well as cellular activities during exposure to the virus.”
He added that this project has now reached the commercialization stage after it successfully showed satisfactory results for more than 700 patients in various hospitals in Iran and in the region. It should be mentioned that this device can be tuned for diagnosis of not only SARS-CoV-2, but also other lung diseases such as asthma and tuberculosis.
Over the past four years, Dr. Abdolahad has patented more than 20 US, European and Chinese patents and published more than 50 articles in some of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, most of which are related to cancer diagnosis methods.
More information about the technique is available in a recent scientific article entitled “Real-time diagnosis of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in fresh sputum by electrochemical tracing; correlation between COVID-19 and viral-induced ROS in lung/respiratory epithelium during this pandemic” which has been accepted for publication in “Biosensors and Bioelectronics”, the second most important journal in electrochemistry area.
