Swab-Seq: Development of a high-throughput platform for massively scaled up SARS-CoV-2 testing and Sequencing

Our work on a novel, sequencing-based diagnostic platform for COVID-19 is out in Nature Biomedical Engineering, click here for full paper!

Here we describe SwabSeq— our efforts to circumvent the supply chain disruptions with nasal swabs and use untapped sequencing capacity for widespread screening of individuals for COVID19. Together with a team from the Departments of Human Genetics and Computational Medicine , we have developed and deployed scalable testing that was used throughout the winter surge in Southern California and has performed over 150,000 tests since starting testing 7 months ago.

Today, our test is used for widespread asymptomatic screening across the UCLA campus and other southern California sites.

I’m incredibly proud of our team for developing and deploying the assay! It was a lot of work, but 100% worth it. Stay safe out there— from what we are seeing— the delta variant is definitely spreading.