UNCG RESEARCH MAGAZINE

Rapid Response

Dr. Diya Abdo calls COVID-19 “anything but the great equalizer.” As the pandemic unfolded in the United States, many people bemoaned quarantine and self-isolation, but as the director of the UNCG Center for New North Carolinians points out, those are luxuries that many others can’t afford.

Immigrants, refugees, those in substandard housing, and low-paid and uninsured workers were among the groups most impacted by necessary closures. They were also more vulnerable to the illness due to employment and living conditions, and lack of health care and health care supplies.

As infrastructures stalled or failed, it became clear that communities served by UNCG centers were in the middle of Guilford County’s COVID-19 “hot spots.” Directors and their staff had to move quickly, in ways outside of their usual “accompaniment model” of service.

In collaboration with Dr. Stephen Sills, director of the UNCG Center for Housing and Community Studies, Abdo secured several grants. But they weren’t the typical grants, which might go toward case management and research. Instead, they were for helping clients meet their most basic needs: housing, food, and health services.

With support from the United Way’s Virus Relief Fund, Guilford County, and the North Carolina Healthcare Association, their two centers – known as the CNNC and CHCS – have been able to offer food assistance, rent support, cleaning supplies, masks,  hand sanitizer, and school supplies to more than 100 families. They’ve also provided educational materials, employment services, public health services, and interpretation services.

Early detection

With community spread of the novel coronavirus occurring in nearly every country, presymptomatic transmission is perhaps the most intense challenge in public health worldwide.

A recent study in Nature Medicine posited that presymptomatic disease stages accounted for 44% of secondary case infections. There’s a critical need for simple and reliable methods to detect the virus early during the incubation period and in asymptomatic patients.

Sensing the virus at such a stage – when viral particles are at very low concentrations – is a challenging task.

Current methods require nucleic acid amplification, explains UNCG assistant professor Tetyana Ignatova in the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. They’re expensive, time consuming, require advanced expertise, and can’t be made widely available at points of care – where patients are tested.

But what if we could do it in a different way: quickly, cheaply, and with high accuracy?

Dr. Ignatova is trying just that, through a new NSF-funded collaboration with Penn State University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The team – comprised of nanoscientists, engineers, and virologists – is working on a device that uses magnetic nanoparticles to bind live virus molecules.

“A magnetic field will be used to concentrate the nanoparticles that have bound the virus,” Ignatova explains. “And they’ll be designed to fluoresce,” or glow. Those steps, which she and doctoral student Kirby Schmidt are developing, will allow detection of the virus at very low concentrations.

“If we can manage this,” says Ignatova, “we can make the detection process much, much more efficient.” Because the test only senses live molecules, it could also reduce false positives from patients tested after the disease has run its course.

“The nanoparticles can attach to any type of coronavirus, not only the novel SARS-Cov-2,” Schmidt adds. “And it may be possible to detect other viruses this way. I am hopeful that this research will drive future detection methods.”