Pop-Up Testing Lab Shows Volunteer Spirit Against Deadly Pandemic

Posted on May 12th, 2020 by Dr. Francis Collins

Caption: Postdoc Jenny Hamilton volunteered to work on coronavirus testing at the Innovative Genomics Institute. Behind her is one of the lab’s liquid-handling systems, which robotically extracts RNA from patient samples before another machine can detect whether that RNA comes from the coronavirus. Credit: Max & Jules Photography.

On March 19, 2020, California became the first U. S. state to issue a stay-at-home order to halt the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The order shuttered research labs around the state, and thousands of scientists began sheltering at home and shifting their daily focus to writing papers and grants, analyzing data from past experiments, and catching up on their scientific reading.

That wasn’t the case for everyone. Some considered the order as presenting a perfect opportunity to volunteer, sometimes outside of their fields of expertise, to help their state and communities respond to the pandemic.

One of those willing to pitch in is Jennifer Doudna, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and executive director of the school’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a partnership with the University of California, San Francisco (UC San Francisco). She is also recognized as a pioneer in the development of the popular gene-editing technology called CRISPR.

Doudna, an NIH-supported structural biochemist with no experience in virology or clinical diagnostics, decided that she and her IGI colleagues could establish a pop-up testing lab at their facility. Their job: boost the SARS-CoV-2 testing capacity in her community.

It was a great idea, but a difficult one to execute. The first daunting step was acquiring Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification. This U. S. certification ensures that quality standards are met for laboratory testing of human blood, body fluid, and other specimens for medical purposes. CLIA certification is required not only to perform such testing in the IGI lab space, but for Doudna’s graduate students, postdocs, and volunteers to process patient samples.

Still, fate was on their side. Doudna and her team partnered with UC Berkeley’s University Health Services to extend the student health center’s existing CLIA certification to the IGI space. And because of the urgency of the pandemic, federal review of the extension request was expedited and granted in a few weeks.

The next challenge was technological. Doudna’s team had to make sure that its diagnostic system was as good or better than those of other SARS-CoV-2 testing platforms. With great care and attention to lab safety, the team began assembling two parallel workstreams: one a semi-manual method to get going right away and the other a faster, automated, robotic method to transition to when ready.

Soon, patient samples began arriving in the lab to be tested for the presence of genetic material (RNA) from SARS-CoV-2, an indication that a person is infected with the virus. The diagnostic system was also soon humming along, with Doudna’s automated workstream having the capacity to process 384 samples in parallel.

The pop-up lab—known formally as the IGI SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Testing Laboratory—is funded through philanthropy and staffed by more than 50 volunteers from IGI, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and local data-management companies. Starting on April 6, the lab was fully operational, capable of running hundreds of tests daily with a 24-hour turnaround time for results. A positive test requires that at least two out of three SARS-CoV-2 genomic targets return a positive signal, and the method uses de-identified barcoded sample data to protect patient privacy.

Doudna intends to keep the pop-up lab open as long as her community needs it. So far, they’ve provided testing to UC Berkeley students and staff, first responders (including the entire Berkeley Fire Department), and several members of the city’s homeless population. She says that availability of samples will soon be the rate-limiting step in their sample-analysis pipeline and hopes continued partnerships with local health officials will enable them to work at full capacity to deliver thousands of test results rapidly.

Doudna says she’s been amazed by the team spirit of her lab members and other local colleagues who have come together around a crisis. They’ve gotten the job done by contributing their different skills and resources, including behind-the-scenes efforts by the university’s leadership and staff, philanthropists, city officials, and state government workers.

Although Doudna and her team intend to publish their work to help others follow suit [1], she says the experience has also provided her with many intangible rewards. It has highlighted the value of resilience and adaptation, as well as given her a newfound appreciation for the complexity and precision of operations in the commercial clinical labs that are a routine part of our medical care.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have thrust all of us into a time warp, in which weeks sometimes feel like months, there is much to do. The amount of work needed to tame this virus is significant and requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality, which NIH and the biomedical research community have embraced fully.

Doudna is not alone. Other labs around the country are engaged in similar efforts. At the NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, MD, staff at the clinical laboratory in the Clinical Center rapidly set up testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and have now tested more than 1,000 NIH staff. Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard partnered with the city of Cambridge, MA, to pilot COVID-19 surveillance in homeless shelters and skilled nursing and assisted living facilities located there.

Hats off to everyone who goes the extra mile to get us through this tough time. I am so gratified when, guided by compassion and dogged determination of the human spirit, science leads the way and provides much needed hope for our future.

Reference:

[1] Blueprint for a Pop-up SARS-CoV-2 Testing Lab . Innovative Genomics Institute SARS-CoV-2 Testing Consortium, Hockemeyer D, Fyodor U, Doudna JA. 2020. medRxiv. Preprint posted on April 12, 2020.

Links:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) (NIH)

CLIA Law & Regulations (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

Innovative Genomic Institute (Berkeley, CA)

Doudna Lab (University of California, Berkeley)