UCLA's New $10 COVID Test Can Process Tens of Thousands of Results in a Day

On October 7, 2020, dot.LA reported on UCLA’s approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for a new novel coronavirus testing method that is faster and cheaper than most on the market, allowing for thousands of tests to be processed and their results returned in a day.

The test analyzes the genomic sequencing of samples to identify infected people — including those who are asymptomatic — by having them spit into a tube that then goes directly into a machine.

The test uses saliva without extracting the RNA from it, and so is "accurate enough" in comparison to the traditional polymerase chain reaction — or PCR — tests, which are the existing gold-standard for testing but can take days to process, said Dr. Eleazar Eskin, a computer scientist and geneticist who is chair of the Department of Computational Medicine at UCLA. He was part of the team that developed the new testing technology.

The researchers who developed the method hope to test the entire UCLA population twice a week beginning in a few weeks and already have a proof-of-concept online, Eskin said.

The platform known as "SwabSeq" looks for a piece of the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2, an RNA virus that causes COVID-19. For every sample of saliva received, the researchers add a barcode or "sticker." They then mix the samples together and put them into the genomic sequencing machine. Then, by looking at the barcode or "sticker" of the result, they can identify those samples infected with the novel coronavirus.

At scale, "it costs $10 a test, and we can do tens of thousands of tests at UCLA with a lab of 10 people," Eskin said. The technology leverages decades of advancements in genomic sequencing technology since mapping of the Human Genome Project.

The traditional PCR tests are far more labor intensive and require extracting the RNA from a patient's sample under a specific safety hood before they can be tested.

"We literally have people spit into a tube and that tube goes directly in the machine," Eskin said. "So it's going to be much more scalable."

The sample goes into a sequencer and then put onto a computer to analyze the data.

SwabSeq was developed as part of a collaboration between UCLA's Department of Human Genetics, the university's new Department of Computational Medicine, UCLA Health and Octant Inc., a startup biotechnology company founded and incubated at UCLA. The group began working on the new method in March, Eskin said.

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