Inside the Covid testing megalab
The UK Government has set up Britain’s largest-ever network of diagnostic facilities
The fight to keep coronavirus under control continues and the UK Government is supporting the Scottish Government by providing all Covid-19 testing outside NHS settings.
Six drive-through testing facilities are in operation in Prestwick, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness, with new walkthrough sites like those in St Andrews and Glasgow opening to boost testing capacity. Home testing kits are also available, as well as testing for care home staff and residents across the country and more mobile testing units.
Providing the test results quickly is a challenge, but it’s one that the Lighthouse labs, including Glasgow University’s new “megalab” are meeting.
The Glasgow lab stretches over four floors in its Govan headquarters, and staff there work round the clock to process more than 50,000 swabs a day – a figure that’s increasing all the time. Carol Clugston,the chief operating officer for the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow, has been involved with the megalab since its launch. “The day we started, in April, we did 41 tests,” she recalls, “Now we’ve just passed 2.5 million cumulative tests.” As demand grew, the lab joined forces with R&D lab BioClavis. “It’s amazing what people can do,” says director Harper Van Steenhouse. “We’ve taken a bunch of bright, motivated people and given them a singular focus: basically attempting to save the world. That can only happen in a scenario like this. It was never profitdriven; never for any purpose other than to give answers to patients.”
People are urged to book a test if they have Covid symptoms ( fever, a continuous cough and loss of smell or taste) and once they’ve been swabbed the samples are taken to a lab like the one in Glasgow.
“Your swab is inside a tube, inside a bag, inside a bag, inside a box,” says Harper, who stresses that samples are kept anonymous. “They get processed out of their packaging and then carried up to first, second and third floors, where the scientific lines are running 24/7.
“All we monitor is barcodes. The scientific team essentially gets just the tube, which has the swab in it. And it’s actually the liquid in that tube that is the patient sample.
“We have big, fancy liquidhandling robots that do most of the work. These robots must be fed constantly – each workstation’s goal is to make sure the next workstation’s robot stays fed.”
The samples then go into a plate in batches of up to 96 tests, where the RNA – the genetic material in the virus – is removed. After NHS Digital pulls the information together, test subjects get a text back on their phone with the results.
People working in the labs are learning valuable new skills, and hundreds of jobs have been created, although the hope is that one day they won’t be needed. But for now, the hard work continues.
“We’re doing what we can to turn this whole crisis into something positive,” says Carol. “We have been able to create jobs at a time when other industries are laying people off. Our facility is in Govan, which is an area where job creation is really important. So we’ve been talking to Scottish Enterprise and Skills Development Scotland about how we can work with, for instance, further education colleges and schools, or retrain people from other sectors who have lost their jobs.”
The day we started, in April, we did 41 tests. Now we’ve just passed 2.5 million CAROL CLUGSTON
We have big, fancy robots doing most of the work, and those robots must be fed constantly HARPER VAN STEENHOUSE PRESIDENT, BIOCLAVIS