Caught in the Act: Tracking the Emergence and Divergence of SARS-CoV-2 through Statewide Testing and Sequencing

In this presentation, Dr. Middleton will review the development and deployment of large-scale saliva-based COVID-19 testing and sequencing methods across New York State. This included optimizing and validating methods for individual testing, as well as high-throughput testing of pools of saliva for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus. This work led to an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA for both tests, which rank as the most sensitive and specific in their class, and allowed his laboratory to process more than 30,000 samples per day during the peaks of the pandemic. The individual and pooled tests were adopted widely across NY state for monitoring the presence of the virus in colleges, schools, communities, and hospitals, and have enabled use of the same samples for high-quality SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing. Dr. Middleton will summarize what has been learned from these efforts, and the ability he and his team developed to identify and monitor the emergence of variants across time, and relate these to clinical, demographic, and geographic features, as well as host responses. The specific use of seqWell’s plexWell platform in this effort will be highlighted.

 

Learning Objectives