FLC | NIH Director lauds CRISPR pioneer's COVID-19 volunteer efforts

NIH Director lauds CRISPR pioneer's COVID-19 volunteer efforts

May 12, 2020

Jennifer Doudna was already well known as a pioneer of CRISPR gene-editing technology. Now she's being recognized by the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her volunteer efforts in the fight against COVID-19.

In his May 12 Director's Blog, NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, described how Doudna, who had no experience in virology or clinical diagnostics, nonetheless led the creation of a pop-up COVID-19 testing lab at her genomics facility.

Doudna, executive director of the University of California Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) and a faculty scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, saw a need for expanded testing in her community and convinced her IGI colleagues to help her create a testing lab.

It was a great idea, but a difficult one to execute, Collins wrote. The scientists had to acquire Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification, not just for the testing space, but also for Doudna’s graduate students, postdocs, and volunteers to process patient samples. Then they had to validate its diagnostic system against other SARS-CoV-2 testing platforms.

The pop-up lab—known formally as the IGI SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Testing Laboratory—was fully operational on April 6, capable of running hundreds of tests daily with a 24-hour turnaround time for results. A positive test requires that at least two out of three SARS-CoV-2 genomic targets return a positive signal, and the method uses de-identified barcoded sample data to protect patient privacy.

Doudna intends to keep the pop-up lab open as long as her community needs it. So far, they’ve provided testing to UC Berkeley students and staff, first responders (including the entire Berkeley Fire Department), and several members of the city’s homeless population. She hopes continued partnerships with local health officials will enable the team to work at full capacity to deliver thousands of test results rapidly.

Doudna is not alone, Collins noted. Other labs around the country are engaged in similar efforts. At the NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, MD, staff at the clinical laboratory in the Clinical Center rapidly set up testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and have now tested more than 1,000 NIH staff. Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard partnered with the city of Cambridge, MA, to pilot COVID-19 surveillance in homeless shelters and skilled nursing and assisted living facilities located there.

"Hats off to everyone who goes the extra mile to get us through this tough time," Collins wrote. "I am so gratified when, guided by compassion and dogged determination of the human spirit, science leads the way and provides much needed hope for our future."

Read the pre-print version of the team's "blueprint for a pop-up testing lab": https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20061424v1.full.pdf