A professor at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) has developed a robust, reliable assay, or test, for COVID-19 which returns results in less than 20 minutes.
Stephen Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine at ARU and a leading expert in quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), which is widely used to detect infectious SARS-CoV-2 in cells, has developed the assay, called Cov2-ID, with colleagues at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford.
The test detects three viral targets, making it more reliable than other tests that look at just one, and was 100% accurate in almost 30 patient samples taken. The test also has the potential to detect viral load, which is the amount of the virus present in each patient.