When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out at the beginning of 2020, the high contagiousness of SARS-CoV-2 made evident the need for sensitive and specific diagnostic techniques to identify infected people in order to: 1) carry out convenient isolation protocols to stop the transmission; 2) ensure patient control, monitoring and treatment for a disease that was completely unknown. PCR was the very first technique to diagnose Covid-19 infections, but its high cost and, especially, the time it took to deliver results, demonstrated that it was not enough.

In this context, the POC4CoV consortium worked parallely on three different aproaches according to the objective target: antibodies (serological test), viral proteins (antigens) and RNA. Such immunochemical assays were intended to be integrated into optical and electrochemical platforms for point-of-care devices.

The project has resulted in monoclonal antibodies with high affinity and specificity for diverse structural proteins of the virus, remarkably sensitive immunoassays for their detection and a technology for the viral RNA detection at low LODs and in shorter times than PCR, patented an implemented into a thermal lateral flow POC, among others research outputs.