UCLA SwabSeq Lab Completes 2 Million COVID-19 Diagnostic Tests

More than four years after the world first learned about COVID that led to an unprecedented global health crisis in modern history and upended life as we knew it, UCLA researchers behind the SwabSeq COVID-19 PCR test came together November 13 in honor of SwabSeq’s third anniversary and its milestone of reaching 2 million processed tests.

“If you recall in the early part of the pandemic around March and April of 2020, there was a real testing crisis. It was considered a major failure of the biomedical enterprise that we didn’t have testing,” said Eleazar Eskin, chair and professor of the Computational Medicine Department, which is affiliated with both the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the David Geffen School of Medicine.

As the world came to a screeching halt in spring of 2020, schools and businesses around the world shut down and nonessential workers were sent home. A multidisciplinary team of UCLA experts in computational medicine, human genetics and pathology decided to take advantage of UCLA’s existing genomic-sequencing capabilities to develop a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) self-administered saliva test. SwabSeq adds a unique molecular bar code to each sample before it is processed by a sequencer capable of testing thousands of genetically marked samples at the same time, with the individual results available in 12 to 24 hours.

Within six months, SwabSeq received the emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October and was deployed across the UCLA campus the following month. The ability to process up to 25,000 samples per day enabled the campus to conduct large-scale surveillance testing amid the pandemic. This allowed for the early detection of positive COVID-19 cases and the timely isolation of infected individuals to reduce further spread of the virus, key to UCLA’s safe return to in-person instruction in 2021.

Amid the pandemic, the team had to grapple with supply chain issues. Plastic perfume funnels were used as a prototype for saliva collection as medical vials were in low supply. To aid mass distribution at UCLA, the team turned regular vending machines across campus into SwabSeq machines that allowed faculty, staff and students to pick up a free kit with the push of a button. But that came with its initial challenge as well.

“If you were ever wondering why some tests had candies and some didn’t, all the tests in vending machines had candies but the non-vending machine ones didn’t,” said Eskin as he explained how candies helped add extra weight needed to test kits so they would drop properly to the bottom of a vending machine without getting stuck.

“SwabSeq brought dependable and convenient access, especially at the very height of the pandemic, to laboratory-level diagnostic tests that helped us safeguard more than 80,000 students, faculty and staff across campus,” said Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “As we move forward, SwabSeq is continuing to harness the incredible potential of engineering and medicine.”

SwabSeq has made long strides since those early days. The team is currently adapting the technology’s diagnostic capabilities to address future public health emergencies. In July 2022, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, provided SwabSeq funding to develop diagnostic capabilities covering all existing respiratory RNA viruses in a single test, and to develop scalable sequencing approaches for the detection of novel pathogens.

“SwabSeq brought dependable and convenient access, especially at the very height of the pandemic, to laboratory-level diagnostic tests that helped us safeguard more than 80,000 students, faculty and staff across campus,” said Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “As we move forward, SwabSeq is continuing to harness the incredible potential of engineering and medicine.”

Held in UCLA Samueli’s Mong Auditorium, the symposium opened with a video tribute from UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. In addition to Eskin and Park, other UCLA speakers at the event included Administrative Vice Chancellor Michael Beck; Dr. Valerie Arboleda, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and human genetics; Chongyuan Luo, an assistant professor of human genetics; and Dr. Steven Dubinett, dean of the school of medicine.

In his remarks, Beck noted how remarkably fast the team moved to deploy the test — both within UCLA and beyond the campus. By May 2020, UCLA researchers had already successfully adapted the technology to create the new diagnostic COVID-19 tests. That technology was derived from a method originally developed by UCLA startup Octant to detect the on- and off-target effects of various drugs.

In addition to its deployment throughout the UCLA community, SwabSeq was adopted by UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and the Los Angeles Unified School District. SwabSeq also extended its test kits to UCLA Health for its asymptomatic testing program and forged a partnership with the California Department of Public Health, making it a key contributor to the state's COVID-19 testing efforts.

“What SwabSeq has been able to accomplish is, I think, uniquely accomplished at UCLA,” said Dubinett as he congratulated the team behind SwabSeq. “We’re not only in physical proximity to a health system, a medical school, engineering and all the other schools on campus, we’re in proximity with our ideas. And being the No. 1 public university in the United States, that means we have to serve the public, and you have done so.”