According to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, volunteers from 4 sites in Madison are being screened for the virus that causes COVID-19 by spitting in a vial, which can be faster, less expensive and less confusing than other regimen tests.
Scientists at the AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory in UW-Madison, a team that in recent years has also focused on outbreaks of COVID-19 and Zika virus when needed, have developed an undeniable genetic testing procedure to locate evidence of the new coronavirus in saliva.
With a national institutes of health grant program that hopes to expand testing in the U.S. Until the fall, researchers have collected a lot of volunteer samples at 3 University of Washington sites: Madison and a local elementary school. The tests were conducted in a matter of hours, in marked contrast to existing waiting times of several days or even weeks for the effects of other types of COVID-19 tests.
“This kind of verification, if successful and can be extended, gives the hope that schools and workplaces can only obtain immediate rotation checks to help with the complex resolution of managing the schooling of the epidemic with verification that is still delicate enough to trap people.” they are contagious, but exceptional in terms of accessibility, burden and response time,” says David O’Connor, a professor at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
They had their first effects taken in late July in a brief exam published in medRxiv, an online page of aptitude science studies that has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a clinical journal. The check was not approved for clinical diagnosis. UW-Madison researchers are investigating whether this type of control can be effectively administered.
“Recent studies show that frequent, repeated testing is key to detecting infected people quickly,” says Tom Friedrich, professor in the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. “Because people can be contagious before they show symptoms of COVID-19, rapid testing can allow them to isolate and protect others before they even realize they are infected.”
The assignment began in February, even before the first instances of COVID-19 gave the impression in Madison, when O’Connor and Friedrich were running with the hospital and clinics at the University of Washington to see if recent influenza diseases were the new virus.
“We try to find out if there’s a silent spread of the virus in Madison,” O’Connor says. “Fortunately, diagnostic tests have been done very quickly. We replace the gears to adapt some other type of nucleic acid test.”
Most screening tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, use a chemical procedure called polymera chain reaction, or PCR, to make copies of genetic curtains in a small pattern to make them less difficult to identify. The Madison organization uses another method, called isolated amplification mediated by opposite transcriptase loop (RT-LAMP) to expand the identifiable portions of the virus that are held in saliva patterns.
“The merit of RT-LAMP is that it is less difficult to configure than PCR and does not require specialized instrumentation,” O’Connor says. “We learned that this type of verification may also be more suitable for places like jobs, schools, and retirement homes that would possibly require verification in the common and repeated place.”
RT-LAMP also uses chemicals other than those of the PCR process, which is so important for pandemic testing that source chains and production capacity have been expanded. And RT-LAMP requires fewer steps, employing easier and less expensive instrumentation than PCR.
“I set up an RT-LAMP kit on a Saturday afternoon and showed that we can take the test,” says AVRL scientist Dawn Dudley. “However, it soon became transparent that this strategy was not as delicate as the PCR, especially in its simplest form.”
THE PCR and RT-LAMP procedures work well if the genetic tissue (the nucleic acids that make up DNA and RNA) is separated from the rest of the saliva, but the simplest editing of RT-LAMP has skipped this step. David Beebe, a professor of pathology at UW-Madison, who revels in conducting lab checks on small, reproducible chips, and Salus, the Madison-based spin-off company he helped create in 2013, joined the organization in designing and producing an extraction procedure that would make outdoor paints. laboratory parameters and make RT-LAMP verification much more accurate with a small saliva sample.
Dudley and scientist Christina Newman spent months adapting saliva control because the organization expected others to get tired of the existing sampling method, with a swab (now also scarce) running deep into the nose.
“The collection is more comfortable, which is especially vital if you get tested twice a week and it’s vital for kids,” Says Dudley. “Swabs can be invasive and somewhat harmful over time. Spit on a tube? It’s not that bad.”
Newman has also established verification sites, adding AVRL and the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, where they research their gadgets from a van twice a week and collect samples from 60 other people at a folding table on certain days.
“Basically, other people come, give their consent and spit in a tube that is left in a cooler,” Dudley says. “It takes less than five minutes.”
With small groups, the remedy can be completed, the effects are read through a color replacement in the check tube and administered in a few hours, and probably without a team of laboratory-trained scientists.
Other teams are also checking the effectiveness of the new control. Chris Mason, a UW-Madison student who is now a professor at Cornell University, is conducting a lamp review in his lab with workers in the city of Racine, Wisconsin, where collection and remanding is conducted primarily through firefighters. Salus is running an advertising edition of the check that can be implemented in small cell labs that Newman believes may be undeniable enough to be used by other people without a long clinical education in the lab.
Researchers performed more than 400 checks, locating two positive cases and one that can be a false positive. Each positive and negative, prospective false positive result was later shown by verifying the saliva pattern with the popular clinical laboratory verification of PCR. Since the RT-LAMP check is not yet approved for clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 infection, researchers are asking hospital doctors and UW clinics to touch the volunteers who tested positive and advise them to perform a PCR check as soon as possible.
Contact: David O’Connor, [email protected]