Web Seminar: A role for Biofoundries in rapid development and validation of automated SARS-CoV-2 clinical diagnostics Presenter: Professor Paul Freemont, Co-Director of the UK Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Synthetic Biology SynbiCITE | Imperial College London

Goals and contents of the web seminar

Duration: ~ 30 min
Language: English

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has shown how a rapid rise in demand for patient and community sample testing can quickly overwhelm testing capability globally. With most diagnostic infrastructure dependent on specialized instruments, their exclusive reagent supplies quickly become bottlenecks, creating an urgent need for approaches to boost testing capacity. Prof. Paul Freemont and colleagues at the Imperial College in London addressed this challenge by refocusing the London Biofoundry onto the development of alternative testing pipelines. In this web seminar, Prof. Freemont will present a reagent-agnostic automated SARS-CoV-2 testing platform using the CyBio FeliX platform and qTOWER³ that can be quickly deployed and scaled. This validated RNA extraction and real time qPCR platform has been UKAS accredited and installed in UK NHS diagnostic labs, increasing testing capacity by 1000 samples per day.