State of the Art on the SARS-CoV-2 Toolkit for Antigen Detection: One Year Later

The recent global events of COVID-19 in 2020 have alerted the world to the risk of viruses and their impacts on human health, including their impacts in the social and economic sectors. Rapid tests are urgently required to enable antigen detection and thus to facilitate rapid and simple evaluations of contagious individuals, with the overriding goal to delimitate spread of the virus among the population. Many efforts have been achieved in recent months through the realization of novel diagnostic tools for rapid, affordable, and accurate analysis, thereby enabling prompt responses to the pandemic infection. This review reports the latest results on electrochemical and optical biosensors realized for the specific detection of SARS-CoV-2 antigens, thus providing an overview of the available diagnostics tested and marketed for SARS-CoV-2 antigens as well as their pros and cons.

Automated summary

The recent global events of COVID-19 have highlighted the importance of rapid virus detection in order to prevent spread. Efforts have been made to develop new, rapid, affordable, and accurate diagnostic tools. Researchers have focused on electrochemical and optical biosensors for specific detection of SARS-CoV-2 antigens.