Anne Louise Wyllie, PhD, Associate Research Scientist in Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases), Yale School of Medicine, "SalivaDirectTM: Simple and sensitive molecular diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance"
In her talk, Dr. Wyllie described recent advances in developing a saliva-based COVID-19 test. SalivaDirect is a product that is able to drastically reduce the turnaround time on testing because it does not require the time-consuming extraction of RNA, instead only requiring the digestion of protein with Proteinase K before PCR amplification. Additionally, it is more cost-effective because the materials are cheaper. From their preliminary effectivity studies, positive agreement with this test is about 94.1% accurate.
