Agilent reveals development of COVID-19 severity screening method

Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced that researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) and the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia have developed a rapid method for differentiating COVID-19-positive patients expected to show severe symptoms from those likely to experience only mild symptoms. The classification algorithm, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, is based on infrared spectra of blood plasma, acquired on an Agilent Cary 630 FTIR Spectrometer. In the study, the researchers collected infrared spectra of blood plasma from 160 COVIDpositive patients from Mumbai (130 as a training set for model development and 30 as a blind test set for model validation). The spectra, collected on a Cary 630 FTIR spectrometer equipped with a diamond-attenuated total reflectance (ATR) sampling module, revealed slight but observable differences between severe and non-severe COVID-19 patient samples.