COVID-19: Advances in diagnostic tools, treatment strategies, and vaccine development
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Review COVID-19: Advances in diagnostic tools, treatment strategies, and vaccine development M SREEPADMANABH, AMIT KUMAR SAHU and AJIT CHANDE* Molecular Virology Laboratory, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India *Corresponding author (Email, [email protected]) MS received 26 June 2020; accepted 15 October 2020 An unprecedented worldwide spread of the SARS-CoV-2 has imposed severe challenges on healthcare facilities and medical infrastructure. The global research community faces urgent calls for the development of rapid diagnostic tools, effective treatment protocols, and most importantly, vaccines against the pathogen. Pooling together expertise across broad domains to innovate effective solutions is the need of the hour. With these requirements in mind, in this review, we provide detailed critical accounts on the leading efforts at developing diagnostics tools, therapeutic agents, and vaccine candidates. Importantly, we furnish the reader with a multidisciplinary perspective on how conventional methods like serology and RT-PCR, as well as cutting-edge technologies like CRISPR/Cas and artificial intelligence/machine learning, are being employed to inform and guide such investigations. We expect this narrative to serve a broad audience of both active and aspiring researchers in the field of biomedical sciences and engineering and help inspire radical new approaches towards effective detection, treatment, and prevention of this global pandemic. Keywords.
Artificial intelligence; CRISPR/Cas; SARS-CoV-2; treatment strategies; viral diagnostics
1. Introduction The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on populations, social structures, and economic growth. These are further exacerbated by the increasing extent of global connectivity and geographical mobility, which expedite infection spread at an uncontrollable pace. The causative agent of this outbreak has been identified as the recently discovered SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Effective control and containment of this pathogen require reliable diagnostic assays and potent therapeutic agents. Recent advances in computational technology and biomedical engineering have placed a toolkit of immense potential in our hands, with a formerly unimaginable capability to enable multidisciplinary innovations and highly accelerated discoveries. In this review, we provide a critical evaluation of diagnostic techniques and treat-
This article is part of the Topical Collection: COVID-19: Disease Biology & Intervention. http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci
ment strategies targeted at the SARS-CoV-2. Alongside an eclectic selection of such reports, our analysis also focuses on the applications, advantages, and pitfalls of emerging technologies like CRISPR/Cas, immune-informatics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
2. Diagnostic tools for detecting SARS-CoV-2 Figure 1 provides a graphical summary of the various approaches discussed herein. 2.1 RT-PCR PCR-based methods a
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