News briefs

Researchers from Murdoch University’s Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC) have developed a new diagnostic tool which may aid the diagnosis of debilitating symptoms of long COVID, which can include severe headaches, extreme exhaustion, heart palpitations and brain fog. Eighteen months ago, the researchers used multimillion dollar nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology to identify new diagnostic molecular biomarkers that tell if someone has the disease, without the need to detect the disease itself. They then used this work to develop an inexpensive clinical NMR that general practitioners can use to detect vital blood markers to predict the long term effects of the conditions. The technology uses a specially designed set of radio pulses to extract signals from highly specific biomarker signals (from inflammatory glycoprotein markers and fats bound to lipoproteins) that gives a rapid diagnosis in approximately one minute. The findings were recently published in The Analyst. “We only discovered these signals about 18 months ago using a more expensive NMR 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 Jeremy Nicholson, Director of the ANPC 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.”