Economical and Easily Obtainable Tools to Manually Develop Lateral Flow Immunoassay Strips

The development of inexpensive and highly functional lateral flow devices, which utilize simple and affordable tools, can make them accessible to many populations with insufficient resources. Therefore, this study aims to provide a method to overcome the cost challenges associated with using expensive manufacturing technologies and machinery, particularly during pandemics and upon urgent need. Here, in-house lateral flow strips to detect serum antibodies were developed using low-priced and easily available tools such as adhesive tape and CytoSep layers. The developed lateral flow immunoassay strips presented here produced signals with 93.3 and 96.6% sensitivity for SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein-specific IgM and IgG antibodies, respectively. The specificity obtained from the developed strips was 96.6% for SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein-specific IgM and 100% for the IgG antibodies by applying only 5 μL from the serum samples. The proposed design was entirely made manually to ensure a method that would make lateral flow devices available to many populations in need around the globe.