Until there’s a vaccine, the global crisis caused by COVID-19 will not truly end, but an easily accessible testing system that can give instant results would be a huge leap in the right direction.
Led by the University of Saskatchewan’s Dr. Walter Siqueira, a U of S team is collaborating with Western University in London, Ontario to develop a time and cost efficient COVID-19 test that can be taken anywhere.
Siqueira leads the University of Saskatchewan’s Salivary Proteomics Research Laboratory and his research focusses on how saliva and salivary components can be used to improve the health of patients, both in the diagnosis and as therapeutics. He’s considered an international authority in the field of salivary research.
“I’ve done work with saliva for more than 20 years,” he said.
“In the past I was very successful creating tests for different outbreak and pandemic diseases like Zika virus in 2017. Now with the coronavirus I’m using a similar technology that I used in the past for the Zika virus where we try to identify the proteins and peptides of the virus directly in the saliva instead of a different component of the virus that is the most common test for coronavirus on the market.
“Our approach is very different where we’re looking for proteins and peptides, this way we hope to increase the specificity and sensitivity of the test. Our approach will take different steps. The first step is collecting samples from positive cases from here in Saskatchewan. For example, that’s why we’re working with the Saskatchewan Health Authority to collect samples from positive cases in Saskatchewan. We then want to identify these biomarkers with proteins and peptides in saliva.
“The second step will be to synthesize, in my lab, these proteins and peptides and create a specific antibody for these proteins and peptides that connect to the specific proteins and peptides of the virus,” he said.
While Siqueira’s research is focussed on the medical side of the test, his counterparts in Ontario are building the physical device for the test.
“We then add this together with my collaborator at the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Jun Yang, who’s working on a device that’s the size of a cellphone where you put the saliva and you have it analyze and identify the proteins and peptides of the virus and it will give you a colour to tell you whether you’re a positive case or a negative case. In a simplistic way, this is what we are working on here.”
Siqueira stresses the importance of test accuracy and that’s the top priority, but wants the test to combined both simplicity and speed once it’s out to the general public.
“Our preliminary data is giving us the information in 35 to 40 minutes,” he said. “Our goal is to reduce the result time to five to 10 minutes without losing the specificity and sensitivity of the test. At the end of the project, the idea is to put a little bit more than a drop of saliva into the instrument and within five to 10 minutes do all of the chemical and colour reaction and change the colour according to if you’re positive or negative.”
With funding from the Government of Canada, Siquiera and his team have been working on the test for over three months and hope to have a prototype out in the next year.
“We’ve been working on this project since April,” he said. “It was April when we got all the human ethics approval, contacted the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and the Royal University Hospital to start to collect samples and put the samples to our methodology.
“We received funding from the federal government through the Canadian Institute of Health Research and this is a special grant that’s a one year project. We expect to start to have a prototype with good results in eight months to one-year. We’re targeting for March 2021 to have a prototype that we can test. We received $937,000 and this is a project that’s co-led between myself and my collaborator from the University of Regina, Dr. Mohan Babu, where he’s going to work more in the treatment part of this and I’m working more in the diagnosis part.”
In terms of how much the test will cost the public to purchase, Siquiera says, it’s hard to put an exact number on it, but with the cost effective technology they’re using, he doesn’t suspect it will be overly expensive.
“This is a difficult question [test pricing] because there’s so many aspects,” he said. “All of the products and technology we’re using are very cheap. Of course, it’s difficult for me as a scientist and researcher to predict how much it will cost because it’s not my expertise, but in an overview I think it will be less than $45 that we are targeting here. Our idea is not to focus too much into the price, but to have something that’s high in specificity and sensitivity, something we do not have in the market yet. The sensitivity and specificity of the tests we have now is not high, we have some problems with them.”
With the accuracy of the test being the priority, Siquiera hopes they can create a far more reliable product than what’s currently available.
“The goal is to get the test [accuracy] up to higher than 90 per cent. That would be much better than what we are currently using now. This will depend on several aspects that in turn will depend on how many samples we get to test and what the modifications are that we go through with the specificity and sensitivity of the test.”
For now, Siqueira says, testing saliva is the key to moving this project forward, but the amount of testing they can do is limited to the amount of saliva they receive from the SHA or via donations.
“The testing depends on how many samples we get from the Saskatchewan Health Authority and how many people want to participate and donate the saliva,” he said. “We aren’t forcing anyone to participate, it’s basically up to each person to understand how important this is and donate the saliva.
“Donating saliva is a very simple process and that’s the beauty of this project. You don’t need someone with expertise to collect saliva because it’s basically just spitting in a tube or using a swab to collect it from your mouth. Then you donate it to us or in the future it will be introduced into point of care devices.
“This will facilitate a lot of the testing and collection of saliva, it’s different than any other body fluid. For example to collect nasal fluid you need an expert or to collect blood you need someone to do that, but anyone can do it with this. I can give instructions in 30 seconds to make someone an expert in collecting saliva! It’s a very easy process.”
