September 25, 2020

expert reaction to preprint evaluating LamPORE rapid tests for Covid-19

A preprint, an unpublished non peer-reviewed study, evaluated LamPORE rapid tests for Covid-19.

Dr Michael Skinner, Reader in Virology, Imperial College London, said:

“It’s good to see 2 modern developments (LAMP and nanopore sequencing, the latter by a UK company) married together to develop an approach that can complement and supplement ‘conventional’ q-PCR testing for viral nucleic acid.

“It’s important to realise that in its mass testing form (using the 5 cells in a Gridion rather than the single one in a Minion) it will still suffer from the same overall constraints that apply to mass PCR testing, namely the supply and upstream processing of the samples as delivered from homes and sampling centres or teams.”

Preprint: ‘Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection with LamPORE, a high-throughput platform combining loop-mediated isothermal amplification and nanopore sequencing’ by Leon Peto et al.  This work is not peer-reviewed. 

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.18.20195370v1

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

Dr Michael Skinner: “No conflicts; declarations as previously, with addition that I served 8 weeks as volunteer lab support worker at Lighthouse Milton Keynes (14 May-7 Jul).”