Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Nasopharyngeal swabs or nasal swabs, used to collect mucus samples to test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, were in short supply. This created a bottleneck in diagnostics, hampering our ability to control the pandemic. To respond to this need, an interdisciplinary team at the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School collaborated to create a new nasal swab design from only one material with 90% or better agreement with existing swabs, and the ability to be used in much faster automated analytical systems.
Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University