A cheaper, faster Covid-19 test

A method for fast, cheap, yet accurate testing for Covid-19 infection has been developed by a team of researchers. The method simplifies and frees the testing from expensive reaction steps, enabling upscaling of the diagnostics. This makes the method particularly attractive for places and situations with limited resources. It is equally interesting for repeated testing and for moving resources from expensive diagnostics to other parts of the care chain. The study led by researchers at the Karolinska Institutet was published in the journal Nature Communications."We started working on the issue of developing a readily available testing method as soon as we saw the developments in Asia and southern Europe, and before the situation reached crisis point in Sweden," says principal investigator Bjorn Reinius, research leader at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at Karolinska Institutet. "Our method was effectively finished already by the end of April, and we then made all the data freely available online."The spread of the new coronavirus at the end of 2019 in China's Wuhan region quickly escalated into a global pandemic. The relatively high transmission rate and a large number of asymptomatic infections led to a huge, worldwide need for fast, affordable, and effective diagnostic tests that could be performed in clinical as well as non-clinical settings.