Overcoming the bottleneck to widespread testing: a rapid review of nucleic acid testing approaches for COVID-19 detection

The current COVID-19 pandemic presents a serious public health crisis, and a better understanding of the scope and spread of the virus would be aided by more widespread testing. Nucleic-acid-based tests currently offer the most sensitive and early detection of COVID-19. However, the "gold standard" test pioneered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention takes several hours to complete and requires extensive human labor, materials such as RNA extraction kits that could become in short supply, and relatively scarce qPCR machines. It is clear that a huge effort needs to be made to scale up current COVID-19 testing by orders of magnitude. There is thus a pressing need to evaluate alternative…

• HH
  Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  Award: CC34430
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Awards: T32GM098218, T32GM007232, COVID-19