Point-of-care testing for COVID-19 using SHERLOCK diagnostics

Corresponding authors: Jonathan S. Gootenberg, Omar O. Abudayyeh, Feng Zhang

Affiliations: Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT; Department of Biological Engineering at MIT;  Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; University of Washington, Seattle; Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard; Massachusetts General Hospital; Brigham and Women's Hospital; Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness; University of Washington, Seattle; Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT; Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT; Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness.

Post online: this article was posted on medRxiv on May 08, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.04.20091231

Highlights

In this article, the researchers reported a simple test chemistry called STOP (SHERLOCK Testing in One Pot) for detecting SARS-CoV-2 in one hour that is suitable for point-of-care use. This simplified test, STOPCovid, provides sensitivity comparable to RT-qPCR-based SARS-CoV-2 tests and can detect 100 copies of viral genome input in saliva or nasopharyngeal swabs per reaction. Using lateral flow readout, the test returns result in 70 minutes, and using fluorescence readout, the test returns result in 40 minutes. Moreover, they validated the accuracy of STOPCovid using nasopharyngeal swabs from COVID-19 patients.

Nomination Reasons

Low-resource and rapid point-of-care test for SARS-CoV-2 are urgently needed to adequately combate the COVID-19 pandemic and reopen the society. The STOPCovid test reported in this article is scalable, affordable and easy-to-use, which will significantly aid "test-trace-isolate" efforts, especially in low-resource settings.

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