Today we crossed a remarkable threshold: 250,000 COVID-19 tests have been processed at the Broad Institute!
Over the course of two weeks in mid-March, Broadies in the Genomics Platform worked with teams across the Broad to transform our CLIA-certified lab into a high-throughput COVID-19 testing facility. Partnering with MA Department of Public Health and local hospitals, the team raced to create a solution to help increase the pace and scale of diagnostic testing.
Broadies in the Genomics Platform, Facilities, EH&S, BITS and beyond have worked nearly non-stop since the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve built a completely novel automation line (in the grand tradition of our Genome Center roots) that is scalable, modular, and able to absorb anticipated future demand. The team that runs this line is here in the middle of the night, on weekends and holidays, turning tests around far more quickly than private labs, and at much lower cost.
There’s no end in sight, and they all deserve our thanks. I’m personally grateful for this incredible team.
Because of them, we are:
- Providing ongoing, proactive testing for residents and staff of nursing homes and long-term care facilities, starting in Cambridge and now, across Massachusetts: more than 60,000 people so far in more than 300 different facilities. This has allowed health officials to pick up on outbreaks early — limiting the spread of the disease and proactively connecting people with care.
- Partnering with Mass Senior Care for a weekly testing program for especially vulnerable populations in low-income senior housing in Chelsea, New Bedford, and parts of Boston.
- Partnering with the city of Cambridge and a local ambulance service to provide tests at no cost for 1,072 medically-vulnerable individuals in 16 low-income housing complexes.
- Providing testing for people staying in homeless shelters in Cambridge.
- Building partnerships with city leaders and community groups in high-need and underserved communities in and around Boston to develop mobile testing capacity, including by forging relationships with clinical care providers who support people who do not speak English: primary languages we are currently focusing on include: Spanish, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese, Cape Verdean Creole, Mandarin, and Portuguese.
- Working with colleges and universities around New England to see how we can assist with testing to support students, faculty, and staff on campus in the fall.
- And, using a very small portion of our capacity to twice-weekly test Broadies to help support the ramp up of on-site work.
All this being done at-cost, to make it as affordable as possible for the people and communities who need support. In fact, as we increase the number of tests we perform, we are able to bring the cost per-test down even further.
So far, Broad has invested $4.5 million in new equipment — plus much more in staff time. We have far more capacity than we are currently using, because we built it in advance of the need we anticipate in the Fall (for more on that, read this editorial in the Boston Globe).
At Broad, our goal is to advance the understanding and treatment of human disease. We try to do so with an eye toward equity and inclusion — stepping in to serve vulnerable populations and organizations that might not otherwise be able to access, organize, or afford testing and care.
I’m enormously proud of our community’s overall response to COVID-19 — spanning test processing, diagnostic advances, genomic surveillance, and research into disease biology — and of everyone who is a part of it!
