Gene editing-based COVID-19 test can tell you which variant you have, and how much of it

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-02-08 12:00

International

Corona_virus_Covid-19_FC By HFCM Communicatie - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

US and Nigerian scientists have developed a rapid COVID-19 test called microfluidic CARMEN (mCARMEN) based on the gene-editing technique CRISPR. They say mCARMEN can detect 21 different viruses, including six SARS-CoV-2 variants (including Delta and Omicron), other coronaviruses, and both influenza strains, The team evaluated their new test on 2,088 patient specimens, and found it matched sequencing-based variant classification almost perfectly. It can also measure SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A viral copies in samples, giving a measurement of viral load.

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Research Springer Nature, Web page

Journal/
conference: Nature Medicine

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA

Funder: Funding was provided by DARPA D18AC00006. This work is made possible by support from Flu lab and a cohort of generous donors through TED‟s Audacious Project, including The ELMA Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, the Skoll Foundation, and Open Philanthropy. Funding for NGS was provided by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 baseline genomic surveillance contract sequencing (75D30121C10501 to Clinical Research Sequencing Platform, LLC), a CDC Broad Agency Announcement (75D30120C09605 to B.L.M), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (U19AI110818 and U01AI151812 to P.C.S.). M.Z. and M.W.T. were supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1745302. B.A.P. is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant T32GM007753. P.C.S. is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Merck KGaA Future Insight Prize. C.M. is supported by start-up funds from Princeton University.

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