Somerset ISD to try new COVID-19 test
Philanthropists back fast, cheaper way to test high volumes of people
San Antonio tech entrepreneur Graham Weston is spearheading the private funding of a new way to test for the coronavirus, with plans to demonstrate it with regular testing of all students and employees of a rural Southwest Bexar County school system.
Somerset Independent School District will play host to a pilot program that backers hope will establish the test as a cheap, fast and accurate way for all kinds of organizations, not just schools, to detect the virus and slow its spread by allowing a fast response to new cases.
The new nonprofit, called Community Labs, had planned a Friday announcement. It issued a news release late Wednesday after learning the Express-news was preparing a story based on sources with knowledge of the effort, including elected officials who toured the lab where large-scale testing machinery is already in place.
Community Labs said it could process 600 tests a day and quickly scale to up to 12,000 a day. It did not mention what several sources briefed on the effort said it was still seeking: FDA approval of the new test. The release said it would use a PCR test, which it called “the FDA gold standard in COVID-19 testing,” to achieve 95 percent accuracy with a much less invasive swab of the nose than tests now in general use.
“Until now, testing for asymptomatic carriers was not avail
able, as testing facilities across the country have focused on symptomatic carriers of COVID-19,” Weston said, according to the release. “We want to help make San Antonio the safest city in America through our assurance testing strategy. We also hope to inspire other cities to set up their own labs and will freely share our process and lessons learned with those who ask.”
Community Labs is operated by the nonprofit Biobridge Global, with “critical collaboration” from UT Health San Antonio, the release said, and is located at Biobridge's campus on Interstate 10. The science behind the new test was “inspired by the work of Scientists to Stop COVID-19 and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,” the release said.
Weston, the founder of Rackspace Hosting Inc., did not respond to an interview request.
Neither did two men who have been helping him raise money for Community Labs, banker J. Bruce Bugg Jr. and lawyer J. Tullos Wells, managing director of the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation.
Community Labs said it was a “collaborative effort” by the three, with Weston the nonprofit's chairman and Bugg and Wells serving as vice chairmen. It said Weston's 80/20 Foundation, the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation and the Tobin Endowment have contributed a total of $2.5 million to start it.
Saul Hinojosa, the Somerset ISD superintendent, declined Wednesday to discuss the project or its timing.
The district had 4,156 students enrolled in its seven schools in 2019, nearly 90 percent of them Hispanic and 83.5 percent economically disadvantaged, according to Texas Education Agency data.
Weston is looking to raise about $10 million for the testing initiative, enlisting Bugg and Wells to help raise the capital, and has put in a sizable contribution himself, one source said.
“Graham is raising money and, at the same time, trying to find customers,” the person said. “They've been pitching this up and down Main Street.”
Mark Larson, a founder of the KIPP charter school network who until recently was running a nonprofit educational consultancy in San Antonio, confirmed he had worked on Weston's project but said he was no longer involved.
Larson briefed San Antonio City Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia last week about the impending test run at Somerset, she said. Larson and Weston showed off the new testing equipment to other officials Sept. 8.
“It's a whole floor almost. It's a huge place,” said Bexar County Commissioner Sergio “Chico” Rodriguez, who was joined on the tour by Hinojosa, the school superintendent, Somerset Mayor Lydia Hernandez and fellow Commissioner Kevin Wolff.
“They have a total different way of testing. How they test our kids, it's right at the beginning of the nose. They don't go inside your nose,” Rodriguez said.
The pilot program would test Somerset students and teachers twice a week, he said.
“This is still pretty far from baked” because the nonprofit is still awaiting FDA approval, Wolff cautioned.
“Their claim right now is they can do thousands with a less than 24-hour turnaround and on top of that do it far cheaper than the private sector is doing it,” at $35 per test, he said.
Wolff said he verbally summed up the plan — testing school kids as they arrive and getting results fast enough to allow Somerset and eventually other school districts to respond quickly to a positive case — and “Graham said, ‘Yeah, pretty much.' ”
The test holds the promise of fast results from “any sort of high volume, dense population locations” including jails and businesses, Wolff said.
“Think of your normal cotton swab that you buy off the shelf at CVS. It's short,” Wolff said. “It's done with existing mass inventory of supplies that's a combination of cotton swabs and blood vial tubes.”
Biobridge Global is a San Antonio-based nonprofit with about 600 employees that operates several biotechnology companies. It was founded in the early 1970s as a blood bank but has grown to provide other medical products and services.
Besides the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center, the local blood bank that provides blood products to area hospitals, it also oversees Qualtex Laboratories, a large testing facility, and Gencure, which collects tissue, bone marrow and stem cells.
Those ventures are supported by the Blood and Tissue Center Foundation, which raises funds on behalf of the company's subsidiaries.
Weston has put millions of dollars into the coronavirus testing project, Wolff said.
The machinery is intricate and expensive, “and then to daisy chain them into an assembly line production, it's a big capital investment,” he said.
After Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Weston and Bugg to his Strike Force to Open Texas in April, Weston immersed himself in the details of rapid COVID-19 testing, seeing it as a means to safely return homebound employees to the workplace, a source said.
Weston also closely followed the work of several East Coast think tanks that promoted the idea of rapid testing at work, and San Antonio was a place where he could “put theory into practice,” the source said.