A concern with commercial COVID-19 diagnostic test kits is that they tend to be expensive, and may be difficult to access in places far away from the companies that produce them.
In order to contain the disease, we need rapid, affordable testing in as many places as possible. I'm working on two projects with the goal of democratize diagnostic technologies - designing qPCR primer and probe pairs to act as positive controls for disease diagnostics, and creating cellular reagents in yeast to make functional thermostable DNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase enzymes. My goal is to make these reagents for diagnostic testing as cheaply as is possible, with the goal of testing as many people as possible, and making testing more frequent, with the end goal of containing the virus.
After they are made, both of these will need to be validated. tests done with the cellular reagents may not be as sensitive as those done with commercially isolated enzymes. I believe that it's still better than nothing, and there are probably places in the world without the financial resources necessary to test large populations for covid-19, that could still benefit from some testing capacity.
Is working on these projects worth-while? If not, why not, and what would be a better use of cellular reagents and diagnostic primers?
Are you in a place in the world that you think this would be useful? Where is that?
Which "cellular reagents" do you have in mind? Attempting to ship live cells to far-flung places with no budget is likely not going to be a rewarding experience. Luckily all you should need is plasmids & primers, which is far more manageable.
The primer and probe sequences themselves are already open source. CDC and many vendors publish their sequences. You can buy them from any oligo manufacturer and ship them wherever they're needed. Formulating them into a reliable test kit is another matter. The kits command premium pricing for good reason. A lot of R&D goes into that, even after you have the reagents.
You can't do any of this with zero budget, but you could look at a few available options:
- Open qPCR instrument
- Opentron pipetting station
- Open source taq plasmids
John Schloendorn
Thank you for your reply!
plasmids and primers are relatively inexpensive reagents for qPCR, proteins are more expensive and need to be kept in a cold chain which is an added cost. I'm trying to think of ways to reduce the cost of diagnostics, even if those diagnostic tools may not be as sensitive as the currently available commercial kits.
premium pricing of commercial kits:
I know that the reason these kits are expensive is because of all the R&D work that goes into them, that keeps a high cost barrier to diagnostics. My understanding is that there are places in the world that can not afford to pay these premium prices. Considering this, would it not be worthwhile to have some sort of open source kit that is substantially cheaper, even if there may not be as much confidence in it as a commercial kit because of a reduced budget? - In short isn't some sort of testing better than nothing?
primers:
Thank you for sharing that the CDC publishes their sequences. If they are published, does that mean that they are freely reproducible?
shipping live cells to far flung places without a budget - I have a plan, including a cloning strategy:
https://app.jogl.io/project/243/HomebrewProteins
What do you think?
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