SERS-based detection of peptide hormone hepcidin for fast covid-19 hyperinflammation screening

This project aims to overcome these limitations by developing and testing nanostructured substrates for SERS-based determination of hepcidin in saliva enabling it as a point-of-care clinical test. This method would diagnose hyperinflammation in a few seconds: being a high promising option to fatality predictor in critical COVID-19 patients. It will be analyzed in a set of 170 patients with mild, moderate, severe and control groups at 0, 3, 9, and 21 days. The SERS results will be jointly analyzed with RT-PCR, ELISA, and cytokines immune essays and clinical imaging tests. Molecular dynamics computer simulations will also performed in order to interpret the results.