he US RADx program has spawned a phalanx of diagnostic products to market in just 12 months. Its long-term impact on point-of-care, at-home and population testing may be even more profound. Source: Nature Biotechnology

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health announced a new initiative on Wednesday to help determine whether frequent, widespread use of rapid coronavirus test slows the spread of the virus. Source: The News Times.

Two US counties will receive a surge of free, rapid, at-home Covid-19 tests in an effort to study how people use them and how that impacts Covid-19 trends in the community, according to an announcement Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health. Source: CNN.

The CDC, in collaboration with the NIH, has launched an innovative community health initiative called “Say Yes! COVID Test.” Up to 160,000 residents in two US communities will have access to free, rapid antigen tests that they can administer themselves to use three times a week for one month.

NIH has awarded four additional contracts for the development and scaled-up manufacturing of new COVID-19 diagnostic testing technologies through its Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Tech (RADx) initiative. The awards total $29.3 million and will help increase testing capacity for COVID-19.

ROSALIND, a software leader in extracting meaningful insights from diverse pools of life science data, today announced the launch of a web-based platform for monitoring the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants and evaluating the effects on the performance of diagnostic tests. The new platform, called the ROSALIND Diagnostic Monitoring (DxM) system, is available starting today and will be used by diagnostic test manufacturers and regulators to monitor assay performance against the rapidly evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants. Source: Business Wire.

The development and authorization of COVID-19 POC and at-home tests has been remarkable; a process that can often take more than a year took only a few months in many cases. We believe that lessons learned from our experiences with COVID-19 could be leveraged to facilitate a large-scale effort for swift, widespread access to accurate and reliable tests for a variety of diseases. Source: Health Affairs.

Abnormal heart rhythms—cardiac arrhythmias—are a major worldwide health problem. Now scientists are using ultrasound for more accurate maps of arrhythmic sites in the heart for improved success of ablation procedures.

“The Biden administration is preparing to launch the first of several Covid-19 testing hubs to coordinate and oversee a $650 million expansion of testing in K-8 schools and congregate settings like homeless shelters.” HHS expects “to open the first hub in April, as part of a public-private partnership that could eventually add up to 25 million tests per month to the nation’s testing totals, two sources briefed on the plans told POLITICO.” This initiative “is the first attempt at formalizing a national testing strategy – something public-health experts have wanted for months.” It follows a marked decline in US COVID-19 testing from about 2 million per day in January to 1.5 million currently. The article mentions “Bruce Tromberg, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health who leads the federal government’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative.” Source: Politico