Scientists from UW–Madison’s AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory, a team that in recent years has also turned its attention to COVID-19 and Zika virus outbreaks as need arose, have tuned a relatively simple genetic testing process to find evidence of the novel coronavirus in saliva.
With support from a National Institutes of Health grant program that hopes to expand testing in the United States by fall, the researchers have collected hundreds of samples from volunteers at three UW–Madison sites and a local elementary school. The tests were completed in hours, a stark contrast to common wait times of several days or even weeks for results from other kinds of COVID-19 tests.
CMB trainers Tom Friedrich and David O’Connor are involved in the effort. Read the full story on the UW-Madison News page.