SBIR Phase I: High Throughput COVID-19 Testing

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is faster turnaround time for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) testing results. Routine testing of nasopharyngeal swabs are being performed globally to try to control the spread of the virus. Ideally, the results of this testing will be done and reported within 24 hours, preferably less. Unfortunately, testing results have commonly been taking 2-3 days or even longer due to case backlogs. Successful development of the technology from this research should ensure much faster reporting of results by reducing the primary bottleneck of sample preparation of COVID-19 testing. In addition, this research should greatly improve the ability to analyze saliva samples by rapidly enriching the ribonucleic acid (RNA) of the virus, and this should therefore lead to greatly reducing false negative results (especially for pooled samples). The proposed project utilizes a patent pending membrane device for rapidly automating sample extraction. The use of these devices allows for samples to be introduced under vacuum, and RNA to be enriched in less than 10 min. The extracts can be rapidly dispensed into multiple 96 or possibly 384 well plates for high throughput analysis. The enriched RNA from nasopharyngeal swabs or saliva will be ready for sensitive analysis using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.