Revolutionary saliva-based assays use pandemic learnings to advance respiratory virus diagnostics

♪ [music] ♪ My name's Anne Wylie. I'm a research scientist at the Yale School of Public Health and principal investigator of the SalivaDirect Initiative. We're currently expanding our SARS-CoV-2 assay that we developed using saliva as a sample type to also detect other respiratory pathogens. So, whether this is for clinical diagnostics or for research purposes, we're interested in targeting say influenza, RSV, or even those that are going currently underreported in the community. One of the benefits of SalivaDirect, the assay that we developed for SARS-CoV-2, is that it's incredibly low-cost. So, this is what's really exciting, especially for research purposes, is that we've seen what a low-cost assay can do for increasing the number of SARS-CoV-2 tests that we have out in the community. But now, if we can also apply this to other respiratory pathogens and just have many more tests available out there, we can really understand what typically goes on in our respiratory seasons, that otherwise we're not normally detecting. We recently just held our first annual SalivaDirect meeting in person. The idea behind this was to bring together all of the laboratory partners that we've worked with over the past two and a half years, as well as all of our commercial or industry sponsors or partnerships. Or even just opening it up to anyone else who's been working on SARS-CoV-2 testing, whether it's for schools or workplaces or communities, or even saliva-based testing. The network that's evolved around the SalivaDirect PCR assay is, I think, unlike anything that we've seen before. You know, we have partners from the laboratories, from research academics, from industry, that have come together to really put everything that they can into the pandemic response. And I think it's really important that we hold onto that and think about how can we keep this going into the future? You know, if another public health emergency arises, we quickly have a network all across the country that we can either roll out supplies to, tests to, to activate local testing in local communities. I hope that we can take what we've learned over the last two and a half years and carry that forward with us. You know, we've seen a rate of collaboration that we've never seen before. You know, people were really openly coming together and discussing what they're seeing in real-time, you know, rather than, you know, sort of working behind the scenes, and then finally coming out with a big announcement, you know? We've talked all throughout these processes, and I think working together, we have been able to achieve so much more than what we can do independently. ♪ [music] ♪