Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there were several techniques developed for COVID-19 diagnosis such as real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) providing high performances of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. Several approaches such as biological detection were alternatively developed based on rapid, effective, and non-invasive. This technique of bio-detection used military trained dogs to differentiate between infected COVID-19 patients and non-infected COVID-19 by sniffing of body odors or human sweats by trained to recognize and respond to the unique VOCs patterns of COVID-19 patients’ sweat samples, which provided fast and high sensitivity results. However, potential compounds suspected to be VOCs markers that training dogs recognized from sniffing had not been clarified enough. A challenge is to identify VOCs markers that dogs recognize and differentiate for SARS-CoV-2. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) has been widely used for VOCs identification coupled with the use of headspace-solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) as an extraction method because of its ability to directly extract volatiles without solvent consumption. Potential biomarkers can be obtained from data analysis using alignment and statistic analysis program that can categorize all identified compounds into groups. The potential markers derived from this research included nonanal, and aromatic compounds. These biomarkers’ production would relate to changes in metabolism pathways in the patient’s body after COVID-19 infection. The researcher anticipated that this study would have practical implications for improving COVID-19 screening by training dogs in the future.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, I.T. and K.C.; methodology, I.T. and K.C., software, S.S.; validation, I.T., K.C. and S.S.; formal analysis, C.K.; investigation, S.S., K.C. and C.K.; resources, S.S., K.C. and C.K.; data curation, I.T.; writing—original draft preparation, I.T. and S.S.; writing—review and editing, I.T. and S.S.; visualization, K.C. and C.K.; supervision, S.S. and K.C.; funding acquisition, K.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production, Ltd.
Institutional Review Board Statement
The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Central Research Ethics Committee (COA-CREC103/2020), and approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University (897/63).
Informed Consent Statement
Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that this study received funding from Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production, Ltd. The funder had the following involvement with the study: K9 dogs sniff COVID-19 in Thailand. The authors declare that this study received funding from Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production, Ltd. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article or the decision to submit it for publication.
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).