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Monday, May 11, 2020

UCLA Coronavirus Test

From the BruinUCLA bioengineering professors and alumni have developed a more accurate COVID-19 testing kit using a new RNA extraction technique.

Daniel Kamei, a bioengineering professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, supervised two doctoral students who founded Phase Scientific along with Kamei and UCLA professor Benjamin Wu. The company recently developed a novel technique for the liquid-phase extraction of RNA, which can process a greater portion of RNA in a sample from a potential COVID-19 patient than the standard solid-phase extraction method of testing.
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, contains a unique set of genetic instructions for each virus. COVID-19 testing kits extract RNA from a patient sample and analyze it for distinct COVID-19 RNA, Kamei said. Liquid-phase extraction, or LPE, can process a greater portion of RNA contained in a prepared sample than solid-phase extraction, or SPE, which is currently the method of RNA extraction in standard COVID-19 testing kits.
The SPE kit produces an extracted sample, called an elution, with a low concentration of viral RNA for analysis, so the concentration threshold to detect the presence of COVID-19 can be very difficult to meet, said Felix Chao, a founding team member at Phase Scientific and a UCLA alumnus.
The LPE method allows for a low volume of the elution, increasing its RNA concentration, which helps subsequent testing procedures to more accurately identify patients with COVID-19, Chao said.
The new technique can enable a final viral RNA concentration on average 15 times greater than when using SPE, Chao said...

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