Experimentation of a new method using a breathing device that could potentially diagnose the coronavirus in under a minute has been approved by Institutional Review Board, otherwise known as the Helsinki committee. The new method is based off a breathing machine developed by Israeli companies Next-Gen and Scentech Medical, and is similar to the breathalyzer machine that police use to find ethanol contained in the blood. Using a similar method to that of the breathalyzer, patients breath into the device, which should be able to distinguish between thousands of gas compounds in the breath, isolating that associated with the virus, allowing for a quick and simple diagnosis. "A quick and simple diagnostic test can be done anywhere, from airports, hotels, tourist sites, and soccer stadiums," said Shulam Lapidot, chairman of Next-Gen. "Our success will help the community and the economy get back to full activity and to their normal routines as quickly as possible."
Next-Gen using the technology of Scentech Medical, which deals with the identification of volatile compounds, teamed up with Meir Medical Center in order to conduct the experiment, testing the new coronavirus-detecting breathing device. The trial will be conducted on coronavirus patients who have varying severity levels of the disease.
The companies explain that this type of examination has several benefits, including facing several difficulties that current medical teams face in diagnosing the virus. One of such examples being the possibility to quickly identify and diagnose asymptomatic patients, along with patients in the early stages disease, so as to enable more efficient quarantine methods.
Furthermore, the new breathing device can significantly reduce the amount of time to achieve results, being able to give a diagnosis in minutes in comparison to the current method which takes up to two days, allowing for an increase in the reliability of results.
Another benefit of the new method is the device's ability to identify the virus's genetic 'fingerprint.' With this ability, the genetic fingerprint of the next potential pandemic causing virus could be detected before it ever causes major damage."It's a revolutionary technology which places the diagnostic field at the early stages of identifying various states of sicknesses, thus contributing to quality of treatment, reducing the damage caused by said sicknesses, and enabling high chances of recovery,"said Dr. Udi Cantor, Medical Director of Scentech Medical. said