HOURS MATTER
Ohio State saves time with its own COVID-19 lab
About a year ago at this time, researchers at Ohio State University's Applied Microbiology Services Lab were thinking about beer.
As part of an effort to support local industry with lab skills and analytical services and expose students to careers in microbiology, researchers reached out to central Ohio breweries to see how they could help. The lab, known as AMSL, even held a sour beer symposium with Wolf Ridge's Brewing in December.
Then came COVID-19, and suddenly, researchers Jeff Jahnes and Seth Faith found themselves swapping stouts for spit.
“We had talked about different options for AMSL,” said Jahnes, lab supervisor. “Never did we really discuss extreme high throughput testing.”
Now, the lab is expected to be a crucial hub of Ohio State's coronavirus response efforts, eventually processing 5,000 to 6,000 student COVID-19 tests per day. Within three rooms in the Biological Sciences Building, technicians began to process those student tests this week, resulting in quicker results at a lower price tag for the university.
To date, Ohio State has conducted more than 170,000 student COVID-19 tests. The university has been contracting with Vault Health to process the tests of asymptomatic students. The company manages large-scale testing for the virus using saliva samples. Leaders have credited this widespread testing with helping to keep virus rates low this semester.
The university is requiring weekly testing of students living on campus, as well as regular testing of random groups of off-campus students.
But testing through Vault had its shortcomings, Ohio State officials say. Student samples had to be couriered hours away to New Jersey every day. That means results usually aren't available until about 48 to 72 hours after a student is tested.
Now, student samples collected at the Jesse Owens North Recreation Center testing site will be sent multiple times per day just a mile south to the AMSL to be processed. Ohio State officials expect this will shorten the turnaround time for results to about 24 to 48 hours.
“Hours matter in a situation like this,” said Faith, technical supervisor at the lab. “We cannot wait two or three days to respond when we know someone is potentially infectious.”
“Just reducing that turnaround time, it's going to help us catch those (COVIDpositive) students who are asymptomatic and get them into isolation and quarantine faster,” said Jessica Buskirk,
managing director of Ohio State's Human Performance Collaborative, who has helped implement the on-campus processing of student COVID-19 tests.
The student testing process using Vault was also costing the university roughly $2 million per week, which the university has been covering with federal CARES Act funds.
While there have been costs to get the campus lab up and running – about $460,000 through the end of September – the new effort to process student COVID-19 tests on campus is expected to result in an 85% cost reduction, Buskirk said.
“Once leadership saw that ($2 million) price tag and they knew that the AMSL lab existed, (Jahnes) really saw that they could transition the lab space from its original purpose to testing for the coronavirus,” she said.
That's when efforts to turn the AMSL into a COVID test processing site really
got underway.
“What month is it? I think I've lost track,” Faith joked as he detailed the effort undertaken to get the COVID-19 test processing lab up and running.
null“we all had our eye on the mission,” he said. “There was motivation there to keep our Buckeyes safe and healthy, and to get this laboratory stood up. and also to save the university money.”
The undertaking required the AMSL to meet various federal requirements and become certified to test human specimens for health assessment. Dr. Leona Ayers, professor emeritus in pathology, stepped in to serve as lab director.
The AMSL began processing a small number of student COVID-19 tests this week, about 350 per day. The university plans to increase that gradually in the coming weeks, with the on-campus lab processing about 10,000 to 13,000 by the end of November – when most students depart for Thanksgiving break – and the remainder of the fall term.
By the start of spring semester in January, the campus lab expects to be processing all of the tests for asymptomatic students – about 20,000 to 25,000 per week, Buskirk said.
“This place will be moving, come January,” she said.
The new process is also expected to speed up the time it takes for students to be tested, which until now has taken about 15 minutes. Until now, when students arrived to be tested, they had to login to the Vault website and submit consent forms when they checked in at Jesse Owens North.
Now, students fill out that paperwork in advance online when they schedule their testing time. The new testing process also requires a smaller saliva sample.
Ohio State's COVID-19 lab relies on the Mychart patient interface system from the Wexner Medical Center. Within that system, students schedule their tests and receive their results.
Once the lab runs the samples and confirms the results, the findings are immediately sent to students via their Mychart account, as well as to the university team monitoring coronavirus on campus.
The lab is still hiring and training technicians, but will eventually employ 30 or more people, many of whom will be undergraduate and graduate students as well as some postdoctoral fellows, Faith said. He and Buskirk estimate some 100 people were involved in getting the lab up and running.
“It was amazing to see all the different organizations, all the talented individuals at Ohio State come together to start this, because it was a tremendously large activity to establish laboratory like this,” Faith said. “For many people, they would be surprised to learn that the science is not the hard part, it's the organization of it.” jsmola@dispatch.com @jennsmola