Israeli researchers develop innovative diagnostic method for coronavirus
Israeli researchers are at the forefront of medical innovation to offer new solutions in the fight against the novel coronavirus outbreak.British company diagnostics.ai, whose research and development is entirely based in Herzliya, is already providing labs in the UK and US with their advanced diagnostic technique, employing artificial intelligence for faster and more accurate results, Brian Glenville, chairman of diagnostics.ai and former head of heart surgery at Hadassah-University Medical Center, told The Jerusalem Post.“In the old days, if you went to the doctor with a chest infection, they would ask you to cough into a pot and send the specimen to a laboratory, which would put it on a plate to grow,” he said. “After 48 hours they would put some antibiotic discs next to it, and another 48 hours later they would tell you which one worked for that bug.”“Several years [later], tests called Real Time PCR or Q-PCR came in,” he added. “They look at the nuclear content, the DNA or RNA, in the bacteria or the virus.”To perform the test, a biological specimen of the patients, for example, saliva or blood, is put into a machine called thermal cycler, which heats and cools the material 30 or 40 times until the DNA or RNA fragments in the specimen have split. The fragments then join to a molecule of fluorescent light.
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