A team of academic and industry researchers led by Jennifer Doudna, the researcher best known for her role in the discovery of the gene editing technology called CRISPR, has turned a 2,500-square-foot scientific laboratory into a facility for running medical tests to detect the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
The laboratory, which plans to serve hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, says it will be able to process more than 1,000 patient samples a day with a 24-hour turnaround, Doudna announced [March 29]. The lab will ramp up to processing 3,000 samples a day if necessary.
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The effort is one more sign of the desperation in major metropolitan areas to ramp up testing for the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2. Two weeks ago, the U.S. had only processed 42,000 tests over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer effort. As of this week, the total number of test results returned has risen to nearly 900,000.
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Doudna’s effort isn’t the first in academia. The Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., began processing test results [March 26], and said it would be able to process 2,000 tests a day with a 12-hour turnaround.
