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Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Aerosol Sense Sampler was announced this week (March 24th). It detects a variety of airborne pathogens, including the coronavirus. The Aerosol Sampler is about the size of a toaster oven. It sucks in ambient air and trapped airborne virus particles — if there were any to be found — into a specialized cartridge. Daily removal of the cartridge then delivered to laboratory for analysis. At $4,995, AerosolSense is reputed to be simpler and more accessible and will enable collection of air samples “by almost anyone” according to observers. One device can cover about 2000 sf. Experts field…
LOS ANGELES (March 16, 2021) – XPRIZE announced today the five winning teams in the $6M XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing competition to create high-quality, affordable COVID-19 testing to help society safely reopen and return to everyday activities. Chosen by an independent panel of judges, the grand prize winning solutions are radically affordable compared to what is currently available on the market; and are comparable to commercial offerings at measuring sensitivity, specificity and limit of detection, with a maximum turnaround time of 12 hours from sample to result. The winning teams are: Reliable LFC, LLC, Antigen Testing, Carlsbad, United States ChromaCode,…
Mirimus is the parent company of SalivaClear, a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing system with a focus on serving schools and workplaces. The goal of SalivaClear is to help people across the nation return to school and work with a self-collection approach that is noninvasive and simple. Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, Mirimus was heavily involved in genome editing technologies, especially in regards to the synergization of RNAi and CRISPR technologies. Mirimus is also considered a world leader in PCR testing, which is seen as the “gold standard” of Covid-19 testing. SalivaClear is centered around three main…
A newly released study in the academic journal Annals of Internal Medicine casts more doubt on policies that force healthy individuals to wear face coverings. To conduct the study, which ran from early April to early June, scientists at the University of Copenhagen recruited more than 6,000 participants who had tested negative for COVID-19 immediately prior to the experiment. Half the participants were given surgical masks and instructed to wear them outside the home; the other half were instructed to not wear a mask outside the home. Roughly 4,860 participants finished the experiment. 42 people in the mask group, or…
Fluxergy is a medical diagnostics company based in Irvine, California. The company was founded in 2003, and aims to answer the question: “Why is there not a better laboratory testing system on the market that can conduct a variety of tests at the point-of-use?” Over the years, Fluxergy has been developing a high-speed testing platform and an overall system that relies on state-of-the-art polymer chain reaction (PCR) and microfluids technology. The Fluxergy approach makes testing portable and consolidates all of the various processes into one device. This device is easy to use by clinicians in a laboratory setting, and it…
Interview with Steven Chang PhD. Can you tell us about your current work? I’m currently involved in a company called Mirimus which has the saliva direct test, that’s licensed from Yale University. We do pool testing on virus on saliva samples for COVID. In people, children, especially because they’re just requires the ability to spit into a container. What is your background in the field of infectious disease? The pandemic that I’m most familiar with is the HIV. And testing was really, really critical, knowing who had the disease, who, how you could diagnose it. And so it became pretty…
This Investment Network is an initiative of The Virus Project a platform for those working on solutions to the COVID crisis. The Investment Network will invest in the most promising solutions.