COVID-19 Rapid Test Under Development at KU moving closer to Commercial Readiness

An at-home COVID-19 test developed by researchers at the University of Kansas is moving toward commercial production.

Dr. Steven Soper, a Foundation Distinguished Professor with appointments in the School of Engineering and Department of Chemistry and his team, which includes a half-dozen graduate students in bioengineering and chemistry, have been working on the project since early June. They have been repurposing “lab on a chip” technology he had previously developed to give doctors simple tools to diagnose conditions ranging from stroke to a variety of different cancers more easily and quickly so that it could be used to select SARS-CoV-2 virus particles directly from saliva samples and count them one at a time.

At-home users would put saliva on the test chip, then use a hand-held electronic reader — about the size of an iPhone — to analyze the results. The whole process would take around 15 minutes.

Soper’s group, including his private company, BioFluidica, is now planning with two commercial companies with experience in large-scale medical manufacturing to produce the chip consumables and the handheld units. Users would be able to buy a test for about $10 and the reader, which can be reused many times over, for about $50. The project will also require emergency use authorization from the FDA; the aim is to begin production and distribution by the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2021.

Soper said he has been told by experts that the need for rapid testing will continue for up to two years. The test would also come in handy wherever groups of people gather such as school and sporting events.

One lesson from the pandemic, he said, is that America needs to be better prepared to respond to future pandemics by building up a stockpile of devices that can be easily adapted to test for new viruses. “We have to have high testing capacity for future pandemics,” he said.

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