On Aug. 18, 2021, Agilent Technologies announced that researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in India and the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia had developed a rapid method for differentiating COVID-19-positive patients expected to show severe symptoms from those likely to experience only mild symptoms.

The classification algorithm, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, is based on infrared spectra of blood plasma, acquired on an Agilent Cary 630 FTIR Spectrometer.