Development of an integrated breath analysis technology for on-chip aerosol capture and molecular analysis

As proven early on in the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 is mainly transmitted by aerosols. This urged us to develop a silicon impactor that collects the virus particles directly from breath. Performing PCR on these breath samples proved equally sensitive as nasopharyngeal swabs during the first week of an infection [Stakenborg et al., 2022], yet it remained a mostly manual process and PCR turn-around-time was still long. To overcome these drawbacks, we developed a fast and sensitive, fully integrated point-of-need breath test, comprising a novel breath sampler device and PCR instrument. The breath sampler combines virus collection and in-situ RNA amplification. The PCR instrument performs very fast amplification of the released viral RNA. Sample-to-result time was reduced to <20 min with an equal performance as the original manual procedure.