Mammoth Biosciences, South San Francisco, Calif, is collaborating with GSK Consumer Healthcare, Brentford, UK, to develop an accurate, easy-to-use, fully disposable, rapid and handheld test that consumers and healthcare providers in clinics can use to detect active SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes covid-19. The collaboration will use Mammoth Biosciences’ clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-based DetectR platform that can identify and signal the presence of viral RNA strands obtained through a nasal swab.
Trevor Martin, Mammoth Biosciences.
The patented DetectR platform has peer-reviewed validation demonstrating the system’s potential to deliver diagnostic results for SARS-CoV-2 in a simple, consumer-friendly handheld format, while retaining gold standard sensitivity and specificity. The test has the potential to deliver point-of-use results in less than 20 minutes, and will not require a complex laboratory setting with large equipment and time-consuming, multistep processes. It will be a disposable and easily distributable diagnostic which, subject to regulatory review, will be available first in the clinical setting and ultimately by consumers at home.
“Our mission at Mammoth has always been to redefine the relationship that consumers have with their health, and through our collaboration with GSK Consumer Healthcare, we’ll be able to do just that,” says Trevor Martin, cofounder and chief executive officer of Mammoth Biosciences. “Covid-19 is, of course, a key focus right now, but as a society what we need is a foundational shift in diagnostics—a scalable means to widely address disease detection. With a CRISPR-based diagnostic we can achieve a rapid and true point-of-need test without compromising the accuracy of molecular testing for all types of infectious diseases.”
For more information, visit Mammoth Biosciences
