New York City has opened a new coronavirus testing lab in Manhattan with the goal of processing about 20,000 diagnostic tests per day by November, which will mean a significant increase in testing capacity and turnaround times as the city continues to reopen its economy.
The Epidemic Response Laboratory will process COVID-19 test samples from the city's public hospitals and generate results within 24-48 hours, according to plans formally announced Thursday in a City Hall press release. The facility is located at the Alexander Life Sciences Center, located on East 29th Street near First Avenue and developed about a decade ago with the help of government subsidies to grow the city's biosciences industry.
The lab currently has the capacity to perform 3,000 tests per day, utilizing technology licensed from NYU Langone Health and Opentrons, a Brooklyn-based robotics company focused on life sciences.
An Opentrons spokesman said testing capacity will increase to 10,000 tests per day by next week. The company's technology will enable lab technicians to rely on three robotic arms to move trays, each holding approximately 380 samples, between different testing stations.
Opentrons insists it can perform 30,000 tests per day by November, 10,000 more than the city forecast. Each test costs $28. Major diagnostic labs charge about $100 per test.
The city's highest number of tests in a single day was 44,200 on Aug. 31, according to the city's coronavirus data website.
The lab will conduct pooling, a process that speeds up testing by combining samples and clearing multiple people at once.
Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the new lab in a statement as "building on our city's reputation as a world leader in making testing available to all."
The initiative comes after City Hall and the city's economic development corporation convened a group of experts, including scientists from Columbia and Rockefeller universities, as well as Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Ian Lipkin, a prominent epidemiologist at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, told Gothamist that the group has been meeting about once a week since April.
“That’s obviously the cornerstone,” Lipkin said in a phone interview Thursday.
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