Novel approaches for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment: a nonsystematic review

Abstract

Since COVID-19 pandemic has been continuously rising and spreading, several original contributions and review articles on COVID-19 started to appear in the literature. The review articles are mainly focus on the current status of the pandemic along with current status of the corona diagnosis and treatment process. Due to some disadvantages of the currently used methods, the improvement on the novel promising diagnosis and treatment methods of corona virus is very important issue. In this review, after briefly discussing the status of current diagnosis and treatment methods, we present to the scientific community, novel promising methods in the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. As with other novel approaches, first, the diagnosis potential of mass spectroscopy and optical spectroscopic methods such as UV/visible, infrared, and Raman spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics will be discussed for the corona virus infected samples based on the relevant literature. In vibrational spectroscopy studies, due to complexity of the data, multivariate analysis methods are also applied to data. The application of multivariate analysis tools that can be used to extract useful information from the data for diagnostic and characterisation purposes is also included in this review. The reviewed methods include hierarchical cluster analysis, principal component analysis, linear and quadratic discriminant analysis, support vector machine algorithm, and one form of neural networks namely deep learning method. Second, novel treatment methods such as photodynamic therapy and the use of nanoparticles in the in-corona virus therapy will be discussed. Finally, the advantages of novel promising diagnosis and treatment methods in COVID-19, over standard methods will be discussed. One of the main aims of this paper is to encourage the scientific community to explore the potential of this novel tools for their use in corona virus characterization, diagnosis, and treatment.

Keywords: COVID-19; Raman spectroscopy; diagnosis; infrared spectroscopy; nanotechnology; novel methods.

Figure 1

Discrimination among normal controls and nonsevere and severe COVID-19 patients with unsupervised methods. (a,b) PCA score plot using spectral ranges of 1600−1700 cm⁻¹ and 1000−1700 cm⁻¹, respectively. Spectra from three patients are marked with arrows. NS = nonsevere. S = severe. (c) Hierarchical cluster analysis (1000−1700 cm⁻¹). The windows corresponding to the three groups are filled with different colors. 1 = normal controls; 2 = nonsevere COVID-19 patients; 3 = severe COVID-19 patients. [reprinted with permission from Zhang et al., 2021].

Figure 2

Action mechanism of photodynamic therapy (modified from Jablonski diagram). PS, ground state of the photosensitizer; PS¹*, excited singlet state of photosensitizer; PS³*, excited triplet state of photosensitizer; ROS, reactive oxygen species; O₂, ground state of oxygen; ¹O₂, singlet oxygen; O₂^−., superoxide; HO^., hydroxyl radicals; H₂O₂, hydrogen peroxide.