Researchers from WA have made a vital technological breakthrough that could help GPs diagnose long COVID.
A team from Murdoch University’s Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC) have developed an inexpensive clinical nuclear magnetic resonance (NRM) technology that GPs can use to detect vital blood markers to detect the long-term effects of the virus.
The technology can provide results in just over a minute using a specially designed set of radio pulses to extract signals from highly specific biomarkers such as inflammatory glycoprotein markers and fats bound to lipoproteins.
It comes in the form of a new diagnostic tool that could be easily deployed in medical practices to aid the diagnosis of lingering symptoms that can include severe headaches, extreme exhaustion, heart palpitations and brain fog, and has potential to be applied across many other areas, including cardiovascular health.
Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Director of the ANPC and Pro Vice Chancellor for the Health Futures Institute, said they represent a translational triumph that will ultimately benefit COVID patients in clinics throughout the world.
“We only discovered these signals about 18 months ago using a more expensive NRM instrument, but with some pulse sequence modifications, we are now able to get identical results on small machines that costs one tenth of the price,” Professor Nicholson said.
“We think this technology (low field NMR spectroscopy) will probably have many other clinical applications in the future and may be of particular value in monitoring some of the residual effects of long COVID in individual patients.
“We are glad now that we have been able to develop a translational technology that might be useful in monitoring COVID recovery, and, we think, the possible cardiovascular problems that can be caused by the disease.”
The breakthrough builds on the ANPC’s prior research from the beginning of 2021, when the researchers used multi-million-dollar NMR technology to identify new diagnostic molecular biomarkers that tell if someone has the disease, without the need to detect the disease itself.
Professor Julien Wist from the ANPC said their new advancement had many potential benefits for GPs, who currently had no diagnostic tools or framework for dealing with patients suffering from the effects of long COVID.
“It ticks all the boxes for a successful translational technology: low costs, low maintenance, no specialist required and no need for complex algorithms to understand the data,” Professor Wist said.
“A key advantage of NMR spectroscopy over other diagnostic platforms is its non-invasive nature which enables the interrogation of molecular and physical interactions and molecular motions in complex mixtures that can carry extra diagnostic information over and above pure concentration data.”
Recent advances in permanent magnet technology have enabled the production of low footprint benchtop NMR systems that can use the same sophisticated spin physics experiments as research machines to better facilitate routine clinical deployment.
“Notwithstanding the challenges, there is an increasing demand for new diagnostic markers at or near point-of-care, where benchtop systems are economically more viable,” the authors said.
The technology was developed in conjunction with the ANPC’s strategic partner, Bruker BioSpin GmbH who manufactured the NMR instruments.
The ANPC has a major long COVID research program, completed by a recently awarded $3.4M grant from the federally funded Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), and initiated with the support from other funders including Spinnaker Health Research Foundation and the WA state government.
Spinnaker Chief Executive, Dana Henderson, said the research into long COVID was one of the most important projects the Foundation had funded in its 25-year history.
“The purpose of our Foundation is to pioneer new ways of doing medicine for the benefit of the entire community,” Ms Henderson said.
“We knew very early on that we needed to respond to this health crisis and to see the research at ANPC translate into a diagnostic tool that could be easily deployed in clinical settings through the world, at low cost, and for immediate benefit to patients, is tremendously rewarding.”