Abstract

Home Diagnostic Testing Before, During, and After the Era of COVID-19

Paul Yager, Professor/Vice Chair, University of Washington

For decades, testing of human samples for acute and chronic diseases has been in centralized laboratories where tests were carried out by trained technicians or by large robotic instruments capable of batch processing hundreds of tests.  While some home sampling had begun to be popular in the last decade (where samples were collected by individuals in the home, but those were mailed to a laboratory to carry out the testing), the only actual home testing was for pregnancy, HIV antibodies and blood glucose.  The COVID-19 pandemic, and the restriction of large portions of the world’s population to their homes has opened up new markets for many types of rapid home testing.  Since 1992 the Yager lab has focused on development of microfluidics for the analysis of biological fluids for use in low-cost point-of-care biomedical diagnostics for the developed and developing worlds.  Since 2008, the focus shifted to two-dimensional porous networks (“paper microfluidics") for ultra-low-cost instrument-free point-of-care pathogen identification.  Readout is often coupled optical imaging for quantitative analysis and data transmission; this has been under support of NIH, NSF, DARPA, DTRA.  In the last year the focus has been on developing rapid mutiplexed nucleic acid testing for respiratory pathogens for the home under support of WRF and the Emergent Ventures fund.