The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has not only disrupted the daily life of mankind, but also plunged the world economy into recession, and Macau economy has been hard hit by the pandemic in the past three years. At the beginning of the epidemic, how COVID-19 was transmitted, how it was diagnosed, and how it could be intervened had been largely unknown. These questions are particularly important for fighting against the disease. A research team led by Macau scientists rapidly conducted systematic and original research, provided important basic and practical applications for effective prevention and treatment of the disease. The research results have not only been published in a series of research articles in top scientific journals such as Cell and Nature, but also have been applied in the clinic and made a worldwide impact.

The results demonstrated that children exhibited less distinctive symptoms or asymptomatic which is more difficult to be diagnosed, compared to the adults infected with COVID-19, and fecal-oral transmission is a real possibility. Furthermore, the research team has developed a highly effective, scalable recombinant protein vaccine targeting to RBD of COVID-19. Regarding rapid diagnosis of COVID-19, we developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system, which could archive a diagnostic accuracy over 90%, providing diagnosis results in just 20 seconds, which is 60 times faster than a radiologist. The AI diagnostic system has been deployed in more than 20 hospitals in 7 countries. The dataset and codes have been published in the National Center for Biological Information and downloaded nearly 3.5 million times worldwide. The team has also developed a rapid test kit for examination of the neutralizing antibodies against COVID-19, which has received CE certification in the European Union. Collectively, the work has greatly contributed our scientific understanding, clinical prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in the world.

Fig. 1 The interface of AI diagnostic system of with COVID-19 based on CT images.

Fig. 2 Characterization of the RBD structural domain of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

Fig. 3 Schematic diagram of the principle to determination of COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies (A) and commercial packaging of the kit (B). (European Union CE certification No.: AT/CA01/I0018810-02)