A quick, easy and open-source SARS-CoV-2 test

25 Jul 2020

When institutes had to shut-down during the pandemic mid of March, many scientists across the VBC campus joined forces to help to fight the virus. Over the past five months, Julius Brennecke (IMBA) and Andi (IMP) worked together with a team of three PhD students, Max Kellner (PhD student at the LMB), Jakob Schnabl and Julian Ross (PhD students at IMBA), to develop a rapid, highly sensitive and inexpensive isothermal SARS-CoV-2 test. The final push was geared towards making the reaction open-access: any molecular biology lab in the world can now produce the enzymes required for the reaction. This is a major step forward towards making testing possible at population-scale and accessible also to low-resource countries.

This work would not have been possible without the help of our on-site biochemists Irina, Benedikt and Johannes and the continous support from our institutes and labs.

Check out our preprint on bioRxiv: “A rapid, highly sensitive and open-access SARS-CoV-2 detection assay for laboratory and home testing.”

The preprint can be found here.