Wyss-designed swabs enter human trials for COVID-19

Sunday, May 3, 2020 - 05:34 in Health & Medicine

Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, in collaboration with health care, research, and industrial partners, have designed a new, fully injection-molded nasopharyngeal swab that can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively at high volume to help address the nationwide and international shortage of swabs for COVID-19 testing and research. The swabs are moving into human trials at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and Translational Genomics arch Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, which should be completed by the end of next week, and are in preclinical evaluation at six additional hospitals. Data from the two trials will be used to inform larger trials with COVID-19 patients, and California-based medical device manufacturer IPB, Inc. has been working around the clock to ramp up production of the new swabs to reach 200,000 per day by May 15. “Experts have recently estimated that the United States needs to more than triple the number...

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