Mammoth Biosciences, one of the two companies developing CRISPR as a diagnostic tool, submitted a medRxiv preprint showcasing their work on a Covid-19 assay.
The SARS-CoV-2 DETECTR assay generate results in 30 minutes from from extracted patient sample RNA. The assay performs simultaneous reverse transcription and isothermal amplification using loop-mediated amplification (RT-LAMP) from RNA extracted from nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal swabs in universal transport media. On the small number of samples tested so far it has 90% sensitivity and 100% specificity for detection of the coronavirus in respiratory swab samples, corresponding to positive and negative predictive values of 100% and 91.7%, respectively.
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This kind of assay may allow testing in the community or even home testing. Good luck to the team at Mammoth in getting this out there!
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