Robotic Pipeline Increases Capacity of the IGI COVID-19 Diagnostic Testing Lab

The IGI COVID-19 diagnostic testing lab has now fully transitioned to using a robotic pipeline with automated liquid-handling robots, increasing the capacity of the lab to be able to process over 1,000 samples per day and quickly report results to physicians. This expanded testing capacity allows the IGI to continue helping the city of Berkeley provide no-cost testing to residents, and allows the IGI to continue testing underserved and high-risk communities in the East Bay, first responders, and essential utility workers across California, while ramping up to support campus reopening efforts.

A process that would normally take many months to implement was made possible by a team of dedicated volunteers, including our own Fyodor Urnov, Dirk Hockemeyer, Shana McDevitt, Enrique Lin Shiao, Jenny Hamilton, Abby Stahl, and Connor Tsuchida; LT Commesser and David Dilworth of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and our partners at Third Wave Analytics and Salesforce. 

Learn more about the IGI COVID-19 diagnostic testing efforts or read more about setting up a pop-up testing lab in “Blueprint for a Pop-up SARS-CoV-2 Testing Lab” in Nature Biotechnology.

Find out how the pipeline works in this comic by Rachel Lew.