Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Patient Care , SARS-CoV-2 , Self-Testing , Specimen Handling , Adolescent , Child , Humans , COVID-19/diagnosis , COVID-19/virology , Health Personnel , Nasopharynx/virology , Nose/virology , SARS-CoV-2/isolation & purification , Specimen Handling/instrumentation , Specimen Handling/methods , Patient Care/instrumentation , Patient Care/methodsABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the need for point-of-care diagnosis of respiratory diseases and microfluidic technology has risen to the occasion. Mesa Biotech (San Diego, CA) originally developed the Accula platform for the diagnosis of influenza A and B and then extended the platform to SARS-CoV-2. Mesa Biotech has experienced tremendous success, culminating in acquisition by Thermo Fisher for up to $550m USD. The Accula microfluidics platform accomplished the leap from the lab to commercial product through clever design and engineering choices. Through information obtained from interviews with key Mesa Biotech leaders and publicly-available documents, we describe the keys to Mesa's success and how they might inform other lab-on-a-chip companies.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Pandemics , Biotechnology , COVID-19/diagnosis , Humans , Microfluidics , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
The impact of repeated sample collection on COVID-19 test performance is unknown. The FDA and CDC currently recommend the primary collection of diagnostic samples to minimize the perceived risk of false-negative findings. We therefore evaluated the association between repeated sample collection and test performance among 325 symptomatic patients undergoing COVID-19 testing in Atlanta, GA. High concordance was found between consecutively collected mid-turbinate samples with both molecular (n = 74, 100% concordance) and antigen-based (n = 147, 97% concordance, kappa = 0.95, CI = 0.88-1.00) diagnostic assays. Repeated sample collection does not decrease COVID-19 test performance, demonstrating that multiple samples can be collected for assay validation and clinical diagnosis.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 Testing/methods , COVID-19/diagnosis , COVID-19/virology , SARS-CoV-2/isolation & purification , Specimen Handling/methods , Adolescent , Adult , Aged , Aged, 80 and over , Child , Child, Preschool , Female , Humans , Infant , Male , Middle Aged , Reproducibility of Results , Sensitivity and Specificity , Turbinates/virologyABSTRACT
While there has been significant progress in the development of rapid COVID-19 diagnostics, as the pandemic unfolds, new challenges have emerged, including whether these technologies can reliably detect the more infectious variants of concern and be viably deployed in non-clinical settings as "self-tests". Multidisciplinary evaluation of the Abbott BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card (BinaxNOW, a widely used rapid antigen test, included limit of detection, variant detection, test performance across different age-groups, and usability with self/caregiver-administration. While BinaxNOW detected the highly infectious variants, B.1.1.7 (Alpha) first identified in the UK, B.1.351 (Beta) first identified in South Africa, P.1 (Gamma) first identified in Brazil, B.1.617.2 (Delta) first identified in India and B.1.2, a non-VOC, test sensitivity decreased with decreasing viral loads. Moreover, BinaxNOW sensitivity trended lower when devices were performed by patients/caregivers themselves compared to trained clinical staff, despite universally high usability assessments following self/caregiver-administration among different age groups. Overall, these data indicate that while BinaxNOW accurately detects the new viral variants, as rapid COVID-19 tests enter the home, their already lower sensitivities compared to RT-PCR may decrease even more due to user error.