“Sorry who is ​Anne Wyllie? Who is ​Anne Wyllie? She’s a research scientist sitting in the US on some university campus. How is she qualified?”

👋

Hi, I am Anne Wyllie. That university campus I'm sitting on is @YaleSPH & we developed an open-access FDA EUA saliva-based PCR test

https://twitter.com/NZStuffBusiness/status/1436737828092743681

What started as a saliva test better suited for frequent, repeat testing than NP swabs and developed to challenge high SARS-CoV-2 test prices and increase access to testing in communities throughout the US has grown into a collaborative network of 138 lab sites in 39 states.

Pooled spits!💦All sorts of models have been suggesting what labs should be doing to increase sample throughput. But knowing that things aren’t always as easy as they seem on paper, we thought it best to try this out for ourselves (with saliva, of course!) medrxiv.org/content/10.110… We pooled together one positive saliva sample with negative samples to form total pool sizes of 5, 10 or 20. We extracted RNA & tested for SARS-CoV-2 in RT-qPCR to check out how Ct values changed. While pooling saliva decreased virus detection, we still detected most infections.

So it turns out that SARS-CoV-2 RNA is remarkably stable in saliva samples, whether stored frozen then tested or just left sitting around in warmer conditions... Fun fact: these saliva samples were collected in nothing but simple, sterile, nuclease-free plastic containers! While fancy collection devices are being promoted for their RNA stabilization buffers, perhaps they’re most useful for generating revenue ;)

AND IT’S LIVE: our latest pre-print, on the use of saliva as a diagnostic sample for #SARSCoV2 testing, from the massive team effort on Yale’s #COVID19 response @YaleSPH @YaleEMD @YaleMed @VirusesImmunity @YaleGH @Yale @YNHH disq.us/t/3o287u4 While saliva has shown promise for SARS-CoV-2 detection, very few studies have directly compared it to the current gold standard, nasopharyngeal (NP) swab. So, we compared NP and saliva samples from COVID-19 patients and self-collected samples from asymptomatic healthcare workers