Source: UF Florida News
Piyush Jain was headed home from another late night in his University of Florida lab when he got the word from his grad student — the rapid test they had been trying to develop for the novel coronavirus worked.
While not yet approved for commercial use, the test uses a strip comparable to a pregnancy test to give a quick visual indicator of the presence of the coronavirus in the body.
“The idea is to have a paper-based system where people can just look at it and say, yes, you have it, or not,” he said.
Jain, a chemical engineering professor in UF's Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering whose background is in pharmaceutical sciences and biomolecular engineering, has been working on improving CRISPR-based testing and applying it to a range of diseases. Long Nguyen, a doctoral student in Jain’s lab, had developed this platform for detecting prostate cancer, HIV and hepatitis C.
“As soon as the novel coronavirus emerged, I saw an application of this technology and immediately jumped right into it,” Nguyen said. “I was super excited not only that the test worked, but also that it showed significantly higher sensitivity compared to other CRISPR-based detection technologies.”
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