Bill Gates driven by his wicked intentions, found that the breathalyzer gives results as accurate as other nasopharyngeal RT-PCR tests within 18 minutes. The test is also able to give accurate results even when patients are pre-symptomatic.
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Bill Gates shared a tweet about the innovative new product from Imec, an R&D and innovation company.
“Testing for viruses with a breathalyzer? It’s possible. Pretty incredible to see the innovative work happening at Imec,” shared Gates on Twitter.
Dec 10 2020: Bill Gates says that the tools being developed to treat the coronavirus are coming late in the pandemic, but that they’ll be helpful in battling the next global outbreak.
“So all these tools are coming right … you know, we wish we’d had them at the beginning,” Gates said. “Even new ways of doing testing are going to start to show up, but mostly that will be valuable for the next pandemic.”
Gates said that the US will likely have to be “a lot better” next time around, including improving surveillance to detect epidemics earlier.
Gates described his disappointment in the US coronavirus response and praised how South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries have contained the spread of the pandemic.
“I would have expected the US to lead the way in terms of getting the testing ramped up and making sure that the numbers never got very large, and I would have expected the CDC to be the voice explaining how things like masks really do make a huge difference,” Gates said.
Gates said that while there are benefits to people changing their behavior, as well as doctors trying new therapeutics – he mentioned monoclonal antibody treatment [a] as one possibility – it’s coming late in a pandemic that has already stretched on for nearly 10 months.
[a] https://www.businessinsider.com/eli-lilly-covid-antibody-treatment-authorized-emergency-use-trump-coronavirus-2020-10“So all these tools are coming right … you know, we wish we’d had them at the beginning,” Gates said. “Even new ways of doing testing are going to start to show up, but mostly that will be valuable for his next pandemic.”
In a 2017 op-ed for Business Insider [b], Gates predicted that the next epidemic could be “a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu.”
[b] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-op-ed-bio-terrorism-epidemic-world-threat-2017-2In February, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $100 million [c] to fighting the outbreak, a large portion of which has been directed toward vaccine development. The foundation is also funding an accelerator [d] to speed up development and access to therapeutic treatments for the virus, and has pledged funds to a project that’s developing at-home test kits [e].
[c] https://www.businessinsider.com/gates-foundation-10-million-to-fight-wuhan-coronavirus-2020-1 [d] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2020/03/COVID-19-Therapeutics-Accelerator [e] https://www.businessinsider.com/gates-foundation-at-home-coronavirus-test-kits-seattle-washington-2020-3Gates told Watson that Jones is the most interesting person he’s gotten to know this year. “We’re similar in that we like to study things,” Gates said.
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Since the start of the pandemic over two years ago, scientists and public health officials have been searching for faster ways of identifying infections. Faster identification is one of the ways to prevent smaller clusters of infections from turning into larger waves of infection. A breathalyser test could allow for multiple tests to be done while still delivering quick results. According to Imec’s website, the breathalyser gives results as accurate as other nasopharyngeal RT-PCR tests within 18 minutes. The test is also able to give accurate results even when patients are pre-symptomatic.
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“Imec strongly believes in the power of aerosols for diagnostics and for gaining insights into disease transmissions. That’s why this new test is not based on exhaled volatile organic compounds (VOCs) but on RT-PCR. This last technique is also practiced in clinical laboratories to achieve high sensitivity and specificity,” the company says on its website. Currently, the breathalyser is under various stages of peer review over its clinical trials.
Imec’s product is not the only breathalyser being developed to test for COVID-19. The US Food and Drug Administration had given emergency use authorisation to a test produced by InspectIR Systems earlier in the year. InspectIR’s test also relied on exhaling into a tube and produced results within just three minutes.
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IMEC leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of more than 5,500 employees and researchers for advanced semiconductor R&D activities, also including system scaling, silicon photonics, artificial intelligence, beyond 5G communications and sensing technologies. In 2022, IMEC’s revenue (P&L) totaled 846 million euro.
At imec, we shape the future.
How? By enabling nano- and digital technology innovation with a significant impact on the quality of life. With our partners from companies, governments and academia. And supported by the three pillars of our R&D:
a unique infrastructure that includes a 2.5-billion-euro 300mm semiconductor pilot line
- more than 5,500 expert scientists from over 96 countries
- an ecosystem of more than 600 world-leading industry partners and a global academic network
Founded in 1984, imec quickly made its name as the leading research hub for advanced CMOS scaling.
Source: Cnbctv18, News18, Wikipedia, IMEC, Twitter, Vimeo
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