U of Illinois Returns to School with 20,000 Saliva Tests Per Day

The school requires each student, faculty, and staff member to be tested twice per week and sends the results straight to their cell phones.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign announced in June that when students, faculty, and staff returned to campus for the fall semester, every individual would undergo rapid saliva testing for COVID-19 twice a week in order to swiftly quell any outbreaks. To process the 20,000 tests conducted each day, the university repurposed its veterinary lab. To take the test, a person only needs to spit into a tube, then the sample is heated for 30 minutes and scientists add chemical reagents to prepare the sample for RT-qPCR. Each test costs $10. The school budgeted $6 million for startup costs and up to $10 million for testing throughout the semester.

The initiative is supported by a cell phone app that immediately notifies individuals of their test results and can alert them if they’ve been in close contact with someone who has tested positive. Those who test positive are quarantined. Now, that plan is being put in place as school is getting underway.

The Scientist spoke with Martin Burke, a chemist at the university who helped develop the saliva test, about how the initiative has gone so far.
The Scientist: First, can you tell me about the tests that you developed that you’re using to do this mass testing?

Martin Burke: Sure. So back in April, we launched a project to try to figure out how to stand up and strategically deploy standard testing as part of the university’s effort to reopen as safely as possible. And we quickly realized that the standard nasal swab viral transfer media RNA isolation was not going to be sufficient. [It would be] too slow, too expensive, and have too many supply chain bottlenecks. So I teamed up with my colleague Paul Hergenrother [another chemist at the university] and launched kind of a Manhattan Project–style effort to find a way to test cheaper, faster, and without the supply chain bottlenecks.

Paul led an extraordinary team of students and postdocs and a bunch of us together and found we could skip the RNA isolation step, go directly from saliva to PCR, and thereby get rid of most of the supply chain bottlenecks, dramatically increase the speed, and reduce the cost. This is the backbone of the programs.

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