“Bioengineering for COVID-19: Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) at Unprecedented Speed and Scale”

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Hosted by: Lori Setton (WashU Biomedical Engineering (BME))

We are excited to share our partnership with six leading BME departments to bring you a Spring 2021 seminar series called Open BME (http://www.openbme.org).  Here we bring together BME faculty and trainees from across the US to share in the excitement of and conversation about cutting edge research.  All Open BME seminars will take place at 3PM CST on Thursdays in a Webinar format with live-streaming on YouTube.  

Registration not required.  Click this link to join or use Zoom Meeting ID No. 95342875447

Abstract: The NIH Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative was launched on April 29, 2020, just 5 days after a Congressional directive to expand the number and type of SARS-CoV2 diagnostic technologies. Four NIH RADx programs now support technology development and delivery with the goal of matching test performance with community needs https://www.nih.gov/research-training/medical-research-initiatives/radx/radx-programs. This talk introduces principles of the RADx Tech “innovation funnel” designed to evaluate, validate, and scale up promising technologies for laboratory, point of care, and home settings. RADx Tech is built around NIBIB’s Point of Care Technologies Research Network (POCTRN, www.poctrn.org) and includes core activities for technology review, validation, clinical studies, and test deployment. More than 700 applications were submitted to the innovation funnel and reviewed on a rolling basis over a ~3-month period. Forty-seven projects received phase 1 funding to validate and de-risk technologies, while 25 companies received phase 2 contracts to support manufacturing expansion and clinical studies. RADx Tech has accelerated SARS-CoV2 test development by supporting innovation and compressing the typical multi-year tech commercialization process into ~6 months. Phase 2-supported companies manufactured >90 million new tests between September-December 2020 and are projected to produce >2.5 million tests/day by March 2021. RADx has help drive substantial growth in new, accessible POC and over-the-counter home tests. This technologic transformation is helping drive a paradigm shift from lab-based testing of symptomatic individuals to surveillance and screening in populations.

Open BME seminars can be found here.

Full list, Biomedical Engineering (BME) seminars

For inquiries contact Suesy Seel.