Clinical Testing of FastDetect Point of Care qPCR System for SARSCoV2 Detection
Project Abstract:
The COVID19 pandemic has presented many challenges to the health care system Control of spread of the virus within the community remains a significant challenge requiring adequate healthcare measures including case identification and contact tracing Seminal to case identification is rapid and accurate testing for the virus Currently test results may take several days or longer to receive after taking the sample Such delays reduce the utility of the results since tested but no reported results may allow patients infected to mingle with the general community further spreading the virus Testing methods can take several hours or even days making onsite testing at schools or public events useless as the results are not available when need for entrance or exclusion decisions The development of a rapid turnaround time of minutes testing method would solve many of these issues with rapid triage of people into infected and noninfected groups The FastDetect instrument represents a device which can rapidly screen individuals for the presence of COVID19 The test requires approximately 15 minutes to generate results using conventional qPCR amplification of a single sample with a fourchannel fluorescence readout The current proposal will test the FastDetect instrument for diagnostic sensitivity and specificity as well as operating characteristics such as throughput and reliability when used by nonlaboratory professionals in a point of care testing environment
