"Even once a test is working beautifully in the lab, it still faces an arduous journey to mass usage. The first challenge is to verify performance, because quality can vary. “It’s a Wild West out there for assay development,” says Catharina Boehme, chief executive officer of the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), a non-profit group in Geneva that is collaborating with the World Health Organization and the University Hospitals of Geneva to assess hundreds of SARS-CoV-2 testing options. Most RT-PCR-based tests that FIND has evaluated perform just as well as the gold standard does, whereas antigen tests have so far fallen short of expectations, Boehme says. Another hurdle is scaling up the assays for mass production. Given this constraint, Boehme thinks it is unrealistic that all the new tests will be deployed before the end of the year — although a small number might be. But once they are available, they could work alongside the gold standard to push countries closer to the target of millions of tests per week — and prepare the world for the next pandemic."
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COVID-19 testing
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