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Rapid Mass Screening on Covid-19
With society on pause and most of the workforce at home, we need quick solutions on how to get people that aren’t carrying the virus back to work. Luckily, promising solutions are being developed and tested as we speak. We want to take a moment to congratulate our client NanoScent on the groundbreaking work they are doing and tell you about their current project, which aims to enable rapid-mass screening to mitigate the coronavirus.
Coming from early cancer detection and early identification of industry leaks, as well as air and water pollution, the NanoScent technology was widely applicable already. Meanwhile, disruptive times call for innovative ways of applying available technology. First trials are giving hope that Nanoscent technology might be able to pick up on the COVID-19 virus in our nasal exhaling breath. The big task now is to validate and refine a testing and screening procedure, that is both rapid and precise.
“The only countries that succeeded in keeping the curve low are those, that did mass screening from the beginning.” Prof. Gili Regev-Yochai, MD
Nanoscent has started testing patients across three countries: in the ER, in Corona-units, hoping to be able to scale up as soon as possible. The hope is to have these tests out in the community in the near future so that patients can simply pick up and purchase a test at a pharmacy, and get quick results in their own home. Until vaccination is available, “this is the only thing that will help mitigate the pandemic”, according to Prof. Gili Regev-Yochai, MD.
Nano Scents?
Scents can be detected at a nano-level long before any of our senses are able to pick up on them. Even when we can detect it with our nose, some scents don’t smell of anything, which makes them completely undetected and can make them dangerous. Coming from cancer research and the ability to screen for cancer scents (an ability medically trained dogs have as well by the way), the implications of detecting scent at the nano-level were mostly intended for industrial leak detection as well as air & water quality control. NanoScent Ltd. translates the scent to digital interfaces, making ‘scent a part of the digital world’.
We are rooting for every step of this process and take a deep bow for these rare cases where science, technology, and governments walk hand in hand to turn innovative ideas into reality, as fast and reliable as possible.