UTHSCT COVID-19 Research: Diagnostic Test Development

April 7, 2020

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler is currently working on a research project to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. With research underway, UT Health Science Center at Tyler investigators aim to discover meaningful advancements on a global scale in relation to diagnostic test development.

This COVID-19 project is spearheaded by Guohua Yi, PhD. Dr. Yi is a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded virologist, whose most recent project, prior to efforts being shifted to the COVID-19 pandemic, aimed to utilize gene editing techniques to develop more effective treatments of multiple diseases and infections, including cancer and HIV.

Dr. Yi’s current project relates to developing a COVID-19 diagnostic test that could be conducted faster, more efficiently and with greater accuracy than current methods. This project will identify an optimal fragment of a protein that binds COVID-19 and will be added to the structure of a carrier protein developed by Dr. Yi. The protein incorporating the virus-binding fragment will be used to build an ELISA test that has the advantages of requiring small amounts of respiratory samples, potentially greater accuracy and being adaptable for high throughput.

Now, more than ever, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler’s commitment to ground-breaking research stands to provide answers on a global scale to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.