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Researchers Develop a Fast, Accurate, Low-Cost COVID-19 Test

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday August 29 2020, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-not-to-like? dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Researchers develop a fast, accurate, low-cost COVID-19 test:

A new low-cost diagnostic test for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) quickly delivers accurate results without the need for sophisticated equipment, according to a study published August 27 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Teng Xu of the Vision Medicals Center for Infectious Diseases, Tieying Hou of the Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences, Bing Gu of the Affiliated Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Jianwei Wang of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, and colleagues.

[...] In the new study, the researchers developed an alternative COVID-19 test by leveraging CRISPR-based technology, which has been widely used in recent years for gene editing. The assay, named CRISPR-COVID, enables high-throughput detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) -- the virus that causes COVID-19. CRISPR-COVID delivers comparable sensitivity and specificity as mNGS within as short as 40 minutes. When produced at a large scale, the material cost of a CRISPR-COVID test could be less than 70 cents, suggesting that CRISPR-COVID is a competitive alternative not only technologically but also financially.

Journal Reference:
Tieying Hou, Weiqi Zeng, Minling Yang, et al. Development and evaluation of a rapid CRISPR-based diagnostic for COVID-19, PLOS Pathogens (DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1008705)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:08AM (#1044083) Journal

    Goes on to put some numbers to this error rate, when testing a population of 1000 people--gives a good feel for what is possible right now.

    And then:

    New Zealand’s real infection rate is vanishingly small, but Abbott’s quick $5 test would read out a false positive You Are Coronavirused for 1.5% of the whole country, never lower, which would be a completely misleading picture that would cause all sorts of needless trouble.

    And that's where the availability of the test in larger quantity becomes important. If you have enough of them and you can perform 3 tests in the same time (to take 2 of the 3 as the answer), your false results frequency drops an order of magnitude.

    That's why I like:

    When produced at a large scale, the material cost of a CRISPR-COVID test could be less than 70 cents, suggesting that CRISPR-COVID is a competitive alternative not only technologically but also financially.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Sunday August 30 2020, @07:28AM

    by deimtee (3272) on Sunday August 30 2020, @07:28AM (#1044107) Journal

    And that's where the availability of the test in larger quantity becomes important. If you have enough of them and you can perform 3 tests in the same time (to take 2 of the 3 as the answer), your false results frequency drops an order of magnitude.

    If the errors are random that works, but it's more likely that whatever was up your nose causing a false positive on one test will be on all three. A better answer is to send positives for a different test.

    --
    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.