BREATH TEST AND SNIFFER DOGS FOR COVID DETECTION
Home-grown system will be tested at land entry point, but swab tests will still be used
AN easy-to-use breath test that can accurately detect Covid-19 within a minute has received provisional authorisation from Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority.
The BreFence™ Go Covid-19 Breath Test System was developed by Breathonix Pte Ltd, a spin-off company from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Breathonix was founded by three NUS graduates, Dr Jia Zhunan, Du Fang and Wayne Wee Shi Jie, along with Jia’s PhD adviser, Professor T. Venky Venkatesan.
It is supported by the NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP).
“Mass, repeated testing has to be widely adopted as a key public health strategy to support the safe reopening of economies, and Breathonix’s home-grown technology hits the right spot.
“I’m confident that their novel technology will make a significant contribution towards protecting the safety and health of Singaporeans and the global community,” said Professor Freddy Boey of NUS GRIP.
Breathonix is working with the Health Ministry to test the technology at one of the land checkpoints.
It will be carried out alongside the current compulsory Covid-19 antigen rapid test.
The BreFence™ Go Covid-19 Breath Test System works by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in a person’s exhaled breath, which are produced by various biochemical reactions in human cells.
The VOC signature from a healthy person will vary from that of a person with an illness, and this variance can be measured for markers of diseases like Covid-19.
The breath test is simple to administer and does not require medically trained staff or laboratory processing.
A person only needs to blow into a disposable one-way valve mouthpiece connected to a highprecision breath sampler. The exhaled breath is collected and fed into a cutting-edge mass spectrometer for measurement.
A proprietary software algorithm analyses the VOC biomarkers, and generates results in less than a minute.
A person who tests positive will need to undergo a confirmatory polymerase chain reaction Covid-19 swab test.
The breath analysis system underwent trials at three locations from June last year to last month. In Singapore, trials were carried out at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases and Changi Airport, while the third trial was carried out in Dubai, in collaboration with the Dubai Health Authority and the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences.