UCLA receives $13 million contract to expand COVID-19 testing

A new $13.3 million contract from the National Institutes of Health's Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative, or RADx, will enable the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA to expand its capacity to process COVID-19 tests. UCLA's diagnostic laboratory will be able to process up to 150,000 COVID-19 tests per day using SwabSeq, a sequencing technology developed at UCLA. The technology pools thousands of saliva samples and returns individual test results in less than 24 hours. "UCLA developed SwabSeq and brought the technology to market in only six months — a process that normally takes years," said Eleazar Eskin , chair of computational medicine at the Geffen School of Medicine and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. UCLA researchers pioneered the technology in April 2020 in collaboration with Octant, a startup company founded at UCLA, and the SwabSeq laboratory opened for business on campus in October 2020. SwabSeq is quicker and less expensive than the widely used polymerase chain reaction method, which requires a secondary process that limits the number of daily tests a lab can perform. "UCLA Health relies on the SwabSeq platform to regularly test its health care workforce," said Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health and CEO of UCLA Hospital System.