A massive 100-square-centimeter sensor can watch viruses kill cells in real-time to test new drugs.
The standard way to test if an antiviral works is a manual process that takes days and requires killing the samples to count them. This new imaging platform uses label-free sensors to record a digital movie of plaque growth as the virus spreads. It accelerates results by about 26 hours compared to the current gold-standard assays. Researchers can now see exactly when a drug begins to fail or succeed without waiting for a final count. This speed is vital during a pandemic when every day saved in drug testing could protect millions of people.
Continuous quantification of viral plaque dynamics using ultra-large-area label-free imaging enables rapid antiviral susceptibility testing
arXiv · 2605.01738
The plaque reduction assay (PRA) remains the gold standard for antiviral susceptibility testing, evaluating drug potency by measuring reductions in plaque-forming units (PFUs). However, the traditional PRA is time-consuming, labor-intensive, prone to manual counting errors, and offers limited scalability. Moreover, its reliance on destructive fixation and chemical staining reduces the assay to a static, endpoint observation, obscuring the dynamic, time-resolved kinetics of dose-dependent viral i