Stanford Researchers Hope To Soon Conduct Over 1,000 Coronavirus Tests Daily
STANFORD (CBS SF) -- Stanford researchers are hoping that they'll soon be able to conduct around 1,000 coronavirus tests daily to provide to patients and hospitals in the Bay Area and beyond.
On Monday, Stanford Medicine said in a press release that their Clinical Virology Lab is testing hundreds of samples from COVID-19 patients daily, adding that within the next week, the lab hopes to be able to conduct over 1,000 daily tests, with results typically being delivered in 24 hours.
"We are tapping into the rich resources of Stanford University and Stanford Health Care to scale up our capacity as quickly as possible to provide the tests that clinicians need to care for their patients," said lab medical director Benjamin Pinsky, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and of infectious diseases at the School of Medicine.
The Clinical Virology lab also provides testing services to several Bay Area hospitals, Stanford Medicine said. A drive-thru testing site has also been set up at Stanford Health Care's same-day clinic in Palo Alto.
Stanford researchers are also providing support in a recently launched clinical trial for a possible treatment for COVID-19, which involves the antiviral drug remdesivir. "Remdesivir, which inhibits the replication of viral RNA, was recently shown to block the ability of the novel coronavirus to infect monkey cells grown in the laboratory," Stanford Medicine said.
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"Very few other places in the country are capable of providing this scale of COVID-19 testing at this point," Pinsky said. "Fortunately, we had the foresight in January to imagine that the ability to provide testing for COVID-19 would be important, and we worked hard to make that happen."
With over 4,200 confirmed cases in the U.S. as of Monday and nearly 180,000 cases globally, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus has created unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations in some areas of the world.
