Comment by johncolanduoni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johncolanduoni | Hacker News Reader

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It’s a thing, but doing a saliva test with limited sample prep (which you need to be beat PCR, otherwise you might as well just make more known to work qPCR machines) is not something anyone has accomplished with it for any virus. It’s a promising technology; but not for having a widely deployable test before we have boring old ELISA antigen tests. Which we have developed for plenty of viruses, and which some individual companies alone can manufacture at a rate of several per second with existing production capacity.

I’m glad more money is being put towards research in this tech (I used to study plasmonics from the physics side), I don’t think it’ll make a difference for COVID specifically before it’s too late to matter.

Test complexity (sample prep, test workflow) is a real challenge to achieving testing scales at orders of magnitude above what is presently available.

We should hopefully have boring old ELISA antigen tests shortly, thanks to Abbott and many of the other folks we've all heard from. The real challenge is scaling testing beyond what can be reasonably implemented from central lab facilities.

ELISA tests don’t need to be done at central lab facilities; there are plenty of machines on the market with varying levels of automation (and many already in hospitals, even in ones that aren’t particularly outstanding). I’m curious what barrier to scaling those with COVID (either by making more of these machines, or repurposing other test capacity) you’ve identified that makes bringing a totally new machine to market more attractive, from a scaling perspective.

> The real challenge is scaling testing beyond what can be reasonably implemented from central lab facilities

The SPR machines I’m familiar with are not inexpensive. Are there machines appropriate for these tests that are less expensive such that it could be rolled out widely? Sample cost is low, but a warehouse shift change of several thousand people isn’t going to need only one machine for screening as the load on the machines will be very bursty.

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