Biosensors for Managing the COVID-19 Cytokine Storm: Challenges Ahead

The global COVID-19 pandemic has oversaturated many intensive care units to the point of collapse, leading to enormous spikes in death counts Before critical care becomes a necessity, identifying patients who are likely to become critically ill and providing prompt treatment is a strategy to avoid ICU oversaturation There is a consensus that a hyperinflammatory syndrome or a "cytokine storm" is responsible for poor outcomes in COVID-19 Measuring cytokine levels at the point of care is required in order to better understand this process In this Perspective paper we summarize the main events behind the cytokine storm in COVID-19 as well as current experimental treatments We advocate for a new biosensor-enabled paradigm to personalize the management of COVID-19 and stratify patients Biosensor-guided dosing and timing of immunomodulatory therapies could maximize the benefits of these anti-inflammatory treatments while minimizing deleterious effects Biosensors will also be essential in order to detect complications such as co-infections and sepsis, which are common in immunosuppressed patients Finally, we propose the ideal features of these biosensors using some prototypes from the recent literature as examples Multisensors, lateral flow tests, mobile biosensors and wearable biosensors are seen as key players for precision medicine in COVID-19