Engineering a solution to high throughput COVID-19 antigen testing in just 9 days

SynbiCITE’s London BioFoundry acts on the WHO recommendation of ‘Test, Test, Test’ to show how throughput can be significantly increased

Re-thinking the approach to COVID-19 testing

As lockdown around the world continues and the brightest and best biologists and clinicians accelerate efforts to develop a vaccine against the virus, immediate solutions are needed to slow its spread. 

While testing targets are still unmet and scaling up has proved to be very slow, identifying and tracking the spread of virus is a critical factor in efforts to slow the outbreak and potentially lessen its impact. The London BioFoundry, part of SynbiCITE, the UK Innovation and Knowledge Centre for synthetic biology, has demonstrated a new approach by adapting two robotic modules to provide additional testing capacity of up to 4000 COVID-19 tests per day. Read more about this approach in our latest blog.

Synthetic biology workflows drive higher throughput testing

The approach, led by SynbiCITE Co-Director Professor Paul Freemont, originates from the flexible and adaptable nature of automated synthetic biology workflows. Using the ‘design, build, test, learn’ approach that is fundamental to synthetic biology, Professor Freemont and a team from the Dementia Research Institute and Imperial College London, used the London BioFoundry’s Felix robots to design new workflows to carry out COVID-19 antigen testing using the standard PCR.

As well as SynbiTECH 2020, we will be announcing some exciting new updates in the coming weeks, so watch this space!

Join us at SynbiTECH 2020 to discuss the ways synthetic biology can transform our world, looking at the challenges and opportunities driving the development of the multibillion-dollar synthetic biology industry.

SynbiTECH 2020 NEW DATES – 26th-27th OCTOBER 2020 

SynbiTECH will be held in the heart of London at the QEII Centre, Westminster, and only a limited number of delegate spaces are available – tickets are allocated on a first come first served basis.