Using a new testing procedure developed by an associate professor in the Department of Biological Science, the TMH-FSU Rapid Response Laboratory is helping Florida State University to quickly identify and trace COVID-19 carriers in the university and Tallahassee community. TMH is providing lab personnel as well as billing patients.
The lab will be an asset for FSU as it begins the fall semester, in addition to giving TMH some additional testing capacity for patients. The facility’s first samples came from TMH patients. When the lab is running at full capacity, it can process 1,000 samples in a day.
“As a leading research university, FSU brings resources to the table that will allow us at TMH to overcome supply limitations and provide for accurate and timely COVID-19 testing on a much larger scale,” said Mark O’Bryant, president and CEO of Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare. “The initial goal of this partnership was to match FSU’s intellectual and technological assets with our commercial and regulatory expertise. Once we have successfully accomplished that, we plan to work with other community businesses to make testing more readily available.”
That supply problem was one that Jonathan Dennis, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Science, had been puzzling over for some time. He knew the supplies were available, just not in a format that others had considered.
The name is the FSU research community’s tribute to the 19th-century Seminole leader, linking his leadership and unconquered spirit to this contribution to the ongoing struggle to contain the virus.