![]() Thank you to Peter Bickerton for additional research and reporting in this article.On March 16th, Gravity Diagnostics began processing COVID-19 samples with a vision to bring increased testing to their local communities, partnering with the Commonwealth of Kentucky to serve the healthcare facilities across the state and later with Kroger Health to bring more testing to Kentucky and nationwide via drive through testing sites. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies that I write about are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest. “There are plenty of lessons learned from COVID that could be applied to future situations where the response can be more coordinated and perhaps more effective in the shorter term for when we have our next pandemic,” he says. Terrill suggests that a major outcome of the current pandemic will be a call to equip the science community with the tools to better deal with the next potential crisis. The public health work that will come from it will be invaluable.” Next time, we’d best be better prepared ![]() “We can take positive patient samples and ask - which coronavirus mutation, or strain, does this patient have? That ability to distinguish between two different sources is going to allow us to map the progression and transmission of COVID. “The power of NGS to rapidly sequence any organism, but in this case COVID, is going to be an absolute treasure trove to epidemiologists and virus researchers globally,” Terrill explains. “The demands of coronavirus have inspired technologies for COVID testing that perhaps would not otherwise have been.”Īlthough testing and diagnostics currently saturate the media headlines, it is the other strengths of DNA-based technology - including the next generation DNA sequencing (NGS) of viral genomes - that will be equally crucial in the ongoing battle against COVID-19, and will help us respond to pandemics in the future. “The Sherlock test is just one example of some pretty creative and outside of the box thinking on how to deploy technologies to solve the COVID riddle,” says Terrill. Earlier this year, IDT paired up with Sherlock Biosciences to deliver a CRISPR-based diagnostic kit with an ultra-fast detection time of less than one hour. That concerted approach has spun out some surprising applications of technology better known in other spheres. “There’s a realisation of the obligation to put commercial interests behind the interests of public health - it’s been pleasant to see the community rallying together.” “The urgent need to provide routine assessable testing has, I think, inspired the entire scientific community to deploy their precious assets and resources to this problem,” Terrill tells me, as we discuss how science has innovated in defiance of coronavirus. That is putting additional demands on IDT.” Science as a candle in the dark, collaboration and CRISPRĪlthough those demands are often strenuous, Terrill is proud of how the scientific community has come together this year - putting public health at the forefront. “With the onset of the flu season, many testing labs are attempting to test for flu and COVID simultaneously. ![]() Among them are the Charité-Berlin protocol and the Luminex SARS-CoV-2 assay, which IDT also offers primers and probes for.Īs we approach winter in the Northern hemisphere, the spectre of another disease looms large on the horizon - throwing yet another spanner in the already encumbered works. Terrill explains that the challenge now is continuing to respond to what has become a “steady state of demand for COVID-19 products.” Along with the CDC-approved testing protocol, the FDA has also licensed numerous other kits, all requiring DNA synthesis. Since that first meeting with the CDC, IDT massively scaled up production, creating a team that could formulate those primers and probes together so that they were reaction ready and ship them around the US, to provide 52 million CDC-approved tests as of November 2. An extraordinary year has called for extraordinary feats.
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