OpenCell, King's College London and Opentrons collaborate to create an affordable container COVID-19 testing laboratory

Scientists at OpenCell and King's College London have developed a low-cost, rapidly deployable containerized coronavirus nucleic acid testing laboratory using Opentrons.

Scientists from OpenCell.bio and King's College London collaborate with Opentrons A low-cost and rapidly deployable container-based COVID-19 testing laboratory has been developed. The laboratory can accommodate one staff member and can process 2,400 samples per day.

This is the first fully functional laboratory that can be deployed immediately to conduct COVID-19 testing around the world. The system performs qPCR technology COVID-19 detection using an automated pipetting platform developed by Opentrons Labworks.

This system is open source, and the reagents and consumables used during the system testing period were not produced by a single manufacturer. This means it is not subject to the reagent and consumable supply chain constraints faced by many COVID-19 testing laboratories. Due to Opentrons' ability to quickly deploy laboratory automation and the convenience of this testing lab's containerized format, the system is ready to be sent anywhere where large-scale automated testing is needed.

In order to respond to the urgent situation of global anti-epidemic situation and quickly transform their work from a concept into a deployable new coronavirus testing laboratory needed around the world, the team has just received a business innovation funding grant from Innovation UK. Helene Steiner, CEO of OpenCell, said: “This work is an important step to increase the number of accredited laboratories able to carry out COVID-19 testing. With the support of Innovation UK, we are working closely with an amazing team and Maintain close communication with regulatory agencies to ensure that our testing laboratory system can maintain high quality, low cost, and meet the needs of large-scale population testing in accordance with strict standards."

Opentrons co-founder and CPO Will Canine commented: “Opentrons has deployed more than 250 robots for COVID-19 testing, and since integrating into this container format, we can deploy hundreds of them wherever automated testing is needed at scale.”

First author Kenneth Walker, who has just completed a PhD in synthetic biology at Imperial College London, said: "I had planned to join the OpenCell team in April, but I felt it was my responsibility to be involved in responding to the international crisis, so I started working early. I have qPCR We have successfully assembled an experienced team in a short period of time and solved the problem of rapid and low-cost testing. The progress of automated work is huge. is the first team to do this using open source robots without spending a lot of money.”

Mark, Head of South London Specialist Virology Center, King's College Hospital Dr. Zuckerman, along with medical colleagues and a team of biomedical and clinical scientists, quickly adapted the department in response to the COVID-19 crisis. He said: "Our laboratory has responded brilliantly to this crisis, with a highly motivated, enthusiastic and experienced team of staff. Over the past few months we have transformed our experiments At present, the hospital has a group of patients with relatively complex conditions who need hundreds of nucleic acid tests every day, but we have We have been freed from a very busy clinical diagnostic molecular workload, however, our short-term freedom is difficult to sustain once transplantation work and other services are fully launched. By working with OpenCell, we are looking to quickly obtain the required certification. "These labs will be made available to workplaces, schools and care homes across the country and internationally to help everyone get back to normal life."

Validation data and open source protocols mentioned in this article are available at BioRxiv , a The industry's cutting-edge preprint research literature database has been widely used to share new coronavirus testing information during its development process.

To learn more about the new coronavirus nucleic acid detection system, please visit https://www. opencell.bio/coronavirus.