By HANNA MORDOH
WISH-TV | wishtv.com
A lab in Fishers has developed a possible solution for mass COVID-19 testing. Quantigen Biosciences has created a swab and tube device that could enable mass, fast and inexpensive COVID-19 testing globally.
“Sometimes the solutions to problems can be very simple,” said Jami Elliott, the founder and CEO of Quantigen Biosciences.
With grant funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and help from biotech partners, Quantigen Biosciences is close to accomplishing an important mission.
“Develop a very high throughput and very inexpensive process for COVID testing,” Elliott said.
A new test could mean faster results for millions of people nationwide. (Photo provided)
The company partners with large biotechs to help develop products such as new tests, new assays and new instrumentation. Their latest development is a no-named swab and tube device, to help make a more efficient and user-friendly COVID-19 testing at half the cost.
“Something that is much like a Q-tip is much easier to manufacture,” Elliott said.
The device is also easier for everyday people to use.
“A patient like you or I could swab our nose on our own, we don’t have to go deep,” Elliott said.
The tube has a barcode to hold patients’ information. It’s dry inside, but labs can add liquid and use an automated process to run many tests at once. The device could be the end of testing on only symptomatic people through a slow lab process and instead enable mass-scale asymptomatic testing.
An example of device usage would be testing all school children. Quantigen said that alone would be about 60 million tests a week.
“Amenable to that ultra-low-cost, super-high throughput,” Elliott said. “By that I mean in excess of let’s say 100,000 samples a day at a site. Such that you can get to that scale needed to get to that really good, robust, return to work and return to school programs.”
The lab started developing the swab and tube device with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the spring of 2020. At the same time, they were running diagnostic COVID-19 tests for Indiana’s Health Department and doing research on testing capabilities for other diseases. Still, Quantigen Biosciences developed the swab and tube in a matter of months.
“The pace has just been, you know, amazing. That means that things like branding and naming have taken a bit of a backseat,” Elliott said.
The no-named swab and tube could be in pilot programs across the country in the next two months. It also brings potential business opportunities for Indiana to be seen as a new home for bioscience.
Quantigen plans to double in size in 2021 and add about 35 jobs. They hope their success can pave the way for the industry to move to the Midwest and help get everyone’s lives back to normal.
“It’s part of the future of testing and I certainly think for super high throughput on mass testing, it’s solutions like these that I think will change the landscape from where we were pre-COVID,” Elliott said.