Seminars in Precision Medicine

Title: “Swab-Seq: Detecting Pathogens using Sequencing”

_{This event is hosted as part of the seminar series featuring leaders in precision medicine from across the nation. Co-presented by the Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics, the Columbia Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Precision Medicine Resource of the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. This event is supported in part by a gift from Pfizer to Columbia.}

Speaker: Eleazar Eskin, PhD
Professor and Chair, Department of Computational Medicine; Professor, Computer Science, Human Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles

Location: Zoom and in-person. Please register to receive the zoom link for this event.

Description: At UCLA we developed one of the only novel technologies for COVID-19 diagnostic testing that was deployed on a large scale.  The assay, which we named SwabSeq, performs genomic sequencing of pooled samples tagged with sample-specific molecular barcodes and then uses computational approaches to deconvolve the pooled samples into individual diagnoses, enabling the testing of thousands of nasal or saliva samples for SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a single run without the need for RNA extraction.  The efficiency of SwabSeq has enabled a small facility with a handful of staff to perform close to 2,000,000 tests, with an analytical sensitivity and specificity comparable to or better than traditional qPCR test with turnaround times of less than 24 h. SwabSeq has been recently adapted for the detection of other pathogens.