Let campus labs fill coronavirus testing gap
As thousands of Americans anxiously await testing for COVID-19, our nation has an untapped resource that can help out — right now.
Our lab is one of hundreds around the country with resources to help. What we need is a green light from government regulators to allow emergency testing in academic laboratories.
The United States must urgently expand access to COVID-19 testing to prevent people from dying solely because our health care system is overwhelmed by critically ill patients. Each day that passes without widespread access to testing heightens the risk, and our leaders need to act quickly to avert tragedy.
Since news of the pandemic broke, we have eagerly awaited widely available COVID-19 testing in the U.S. Thousands of doctors and nurses are still waiting. Tens of thousands of sick people are waiting — people who have COVID-19 symptoms but who cannot be tested due to lack of capacity.
Other countries solved this problem. South Korea mounted a highly successful program that has tested nearly a quartermillion people and is administering 15,000 tests every day. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of March 15, the U.S. had tested fewer than 23,000 people.
We shouldn’t have to wait. We, and thousands like us, are ready to help right now.
We urgently call on federal and state officials to enlist help from thousands of labs like ours. Virtually every U.S. university and academic medical center has the equipment and trained personnel to safely and accurately test for COVID-19. Coordinating these resources could immediately address the challenge.
We understand the challenges of developing and delivering diagnostics at scale and in challenging circumstances. Our lab at Rice University develops affordable, effective diagnostic tests for hospitals and clinics in communities that can least afford quality health care. Our partners are in sub-Saharan Africa, rural regions of Brazil and other places where it would be impossible to rapidly scale up COVID-19 testing.
The U.S. is different. We have the workforce and infrastructure to scale up. The necessary equipment includes centrifuges, which spin samples at high speeds to isolate specific components like viruses or cells, and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) instruments, which amplify DNA or RNA to detectable levels and report amplification progress in real time. This equipment is already in place in many university labs.
What about supplies and procedures? Performing qPCR testing for COVID-19 requires three key steps: sample preparation to isolate viral RNA from a nasal swab, amplification of viral RNA, and detection of results. Open-source lab test procedures are widely available to support all of these steps. For example, Boston University’s Catherine Klapperich, a pioneer in the development of point-ofcare diagnostics, recently curated open-source approaches for performing the first step of the process. Similarly, there are many validated alternatives to amplify viral RNA and detect COVID-19 that are not currently experiencing supply shortages. The CDC-designed primers, for example, are available to research labs with no reported supply shortages.
Time is of the essence. Regulatory agencies should take immediate action to tap the research infrastructure at U.S. universities and academic medical centers to expand testing. We and many others are ready, willing and able to help perform the tests that patients need and doctors want to prescribe.
Enlisting help from us and others like us will require coordination, creativity, clear guidance and, above all, decisive action. Labs must be appropriately validated for safety and quality.
Every day we wait to rapidly scale up testing will have devastating consequences for our country’s health. If we do not start wisely utilizing all of our diagnostic resources to help slow transmission of the disease, we risk straining our health care system beyond its limit. We need to be wise about who is tested and how we use existing resources, and we need to start now.