UCLA Health scientists pioneer faster, cheaper COVID-19 testing

Scientists at  UCLA Health will soon be using a new coronavirus testing technology capable of assessing thousands of individual samples for COVID-19 simultaneously and producing accurate results in 12 to 24 hours.The SwabSeq testing platform, developed collaboratively byUCLA researchers and a UCLA-founded startup, is quicker and less expensive than the widely used polymerase chain reaction method, which requires extracting RNA from samples and can take days to process, the scientists said.“This is a technological breakthrough that will dramatically increase the amount of COVID-19 testing while reducing the wait time for results and costs,” said Dr. John Mazziotta, vice chancellor for UCLA Health Sciences and CEO of UCLA Health.SwabSeq takes a person ’s saliva and attaches a type of molecular “bar code” to each sample,allowing scientists to combine large batches of samples together in a sequencing machine and rapidly identify those that have the virus. The testing method, which receivedemergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Oct. 6, can also be applied to nasal and oral COVID-19 testing samples and can be scaled up easily, according to the researchers.“SwabSeq is highly scalable because it leverages two decades of advances in genomic sequencing technology,” said Eleazar Eskin, chair of UCLA’s Department of Computational Medicine, who was part of the research team that the developed the new platform. “Using SwabSeq, a relati...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news