UCLA Health scientists pioneer faster, cheaper COVID-19 testing

Unsplash/Mufid Majnun The new testing method was developed collaboratively by UCLA researchers and a startup company founded at UCLA. 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 by UCLA 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 received emergency 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.