Researchers started the design of a home testing kit for Covid-19

A team of scientists, clinicians and researchers from Imperial College London and the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust will lead the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) programme to conduct home testing and improve understanding of the spread of Coronavirus and the recovering rate since the outbreak.

Prof. Ara Darzi, a sponsor of the REACT programme at Imperial, said: “Short of a vaccine, testing is the only way out of lockdown. But the testing landscape is like the Wild West with no rules, no standards and widely varying reliability. Even the most accurate test is useless unless it is usable. With this ambitious programme, the biggest in England, we aim to establish a viable testing programme on which the Government can rely.”

The test will look at markers, virus antibodies, to determine infected and recovered individuals. The first part of the programme (REACT-1) will test 100,000 randomly selected people across 315 authorities in England. The samples will be testes for current infections in the laboratories.

In the second part of the programme (REACT-2), different antibody tests will be assessed for their accuracy and how easily people can use them at home. Antibody testing will determine how far the infection has spread and what proportion of the population has been infected. REACT-2 will first address volunteers from Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust who had the virus, to establish the accuracy of the test.

Professor Paul Elliott, director of the programme at Imperial, said:
“Community testing is a vital next step in ongoing efforts to mitigate the pandemic, but to be successful this must be based on robust scientific evidence. Through this important programme, we will gather the critical knowledge base necessary to underpin community testing programmes and facilitate a greater understanding of the prevalence of COVID-19 in the UK.”

If successful, the test will be distributed to a larger group of people to ensure it is usable by a wide range of the public. The aim will first be to understand whether people can perform the test themselves, then accuracy will be assessed by comparing results from home tests and test administered by a health professional.

Professor Helen Ward, Professor of Public Health at Imperial College London, said: “As part of this project we will work with public volunteers and patient advisors to see how easy it is for people to do these tests at home, and co-design the information and packaging that will go out with the tests. We have already had an excellent response from members of the public who are keen to support our research.”

The work is being commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care and carried out in partnership with IpsosMORI.

Adapted from: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/197217/home-testing-coronavirus-track-le...
More information: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/197217/home-testing-coronavirus-track-le...