More than 80,000 tests done in under two months — ScienceDaily

In an post showing in Mother nature Biomedical Engineering, a staff of researchers from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and UCLA Faculty of Engineering report serious-entire world effects on SwabSeq, a significant-throughput testing platform that utilizes sequencing to examination hundreds of samples at a time to detect COVID-19. They ended up able to complete more than 80,000 assessments in significantly less than two months, with the test demonstrating incredibly large sensitivity and specificity.

SwabSeq makes use of sample-unique molecular barcodes to concurrently analyze hundreds of samples for the existence or absence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that results in COVID-19. SwabSeq was granted Fda Unexpected emergency Use Authorization in Oct and is at present deployed at UCLA in a high-complexity CLIA laboratory, which has performed over 150,000 exams considering that December 2020. SwabSeq is a flexible protocol and can quickly scale up screening for novel pathogens, such as COVID-19 and long run emerging viruses.

“We have optimized SwabSeq to prioritize scale and lower price, vital components that are lacking from present-day COVID-19 diagnostics,” the authors create.

“These outcomes demonstrate the likely of SwabSeq to be employed for SARS-CoV-2 testing on an unprecedented scale,” explained Dr. Valerie Arboleda, Assistant Professor and direct scientist on the undertaking. “SwabSeq offers a potential alternative to the need for populace-huge testing to stem the pandemic.” In the months due to the fact, the team has ongoing to use the exam, and as of this date has executed additional than 150,000 assessments.

The groundbreaking technological innovation was formulated in a collaboration among scientists at the Department of Computational Medicine affiliated with the two the David Geffen School of Drugs and the Samueli University of Engineering at UCLA, the Section of Human Genetics, the Section of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Octant, a get started-up company started and incubated at UCLA. SwabSeq is a modification of Octant’s know-how that is becoming utilized toward drug discovery and has been made readily available broadly to battle the pandemic. UCLA experts have been main a broader coalition of tutorial and industrial labs all-around the place and the earth to create the technology to scale up COVID-19 screening.

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