A team of scientists from UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and UCLA School of Engineering published real-world results about SwabSeq. This high-throughput testing platform uses sequencing to analyze thousands of samples to detect COVID-19. The test showed extremely high specificity and sensitivity, and they were able to run more than 80,000 tests in just two months.SwabSeq analyzes thousands of samples simultaneously for SARS-CoV-2. This virus causes COVID-19. SwabSeq received FDA Emergency Use Authorization (October) and is currently being deployed at UCLA in a high complexity CLIA laboratory. It has conducted over 150,000 tests since 2020. SwabSeq can be scaled up quickly to test for new pathogens including COVID-19, and other emerging viruses.The authors explain that SwabSeq has been optimized to prioritize scale and low costs, which are key factors missing in current COVID-19 diagnostics."These results show the potential of SwabSeq for SARS-CoV-2 Testing on an unprecedented scale," stated Dr. Valerie Arboleda who is also the Assistant Professor and the lead scientist in the project. SwabSeq could be a solution to the problem of pandemic-related population-wide testing. The team continued to use the test over the following months, performing more than 150,000 tests.This groundbreaking technology was created in collaboration between scientists from the Department of Computational Medicine at UCLA and the Samueli School of Engineering. It was also developed by the Department of Human Genetics and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. SwabSeq, a modified Octant technology that's being used to discover new drugs, has been made widely available to combat the pandemic. UCLA scientists are leading a wider coalition of industrial and academic labs in the United States and around the globe to develop the technology for scaling up COVID-19 testing.
