All too often, science is siloed into discrete units tied to disciplines, academic institutions, countries — or even academia versus industry. Yet in February 2020, as SARS-CoV-2 began spreading more widely and disastrously around the world, the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR) broke down these barriers by gathering at Harvard Medical School to focus on the many challenges of the virus causing COVID-19. Part of a $115 million research initiative funded by the China Evergrande Group, MassCPR has brought together top scientists and researchers drawn from many spheres within Harvard, Chinese universities, and the Boston ecosystem. Their collective mission drives six collaborative teams working to illuminate the basic biology and vulnerabilities of the novel coronavirus, define its epidemiology, and create the diagnostic tools, antiviral therapies, and vaccines needed to combat COVID-19, which is affecting economies and lives in every corner of the globe. A further goal of this remarkable, unprecedented venture is building the scientific infrastructure and ability to swiftly respond to future health crises.

Stanley Shaw, MD, PhD, the Associate Dean for Executive Education at HMS, invited Pardis Sabeti, MD, DPhil, David R. Walt, PhD, and Bronwyn MacInnis, PhD, three colleagues from the Diagnostics Working Group, to share a bit about evolving priorities and early progress on COVID-19 diagnostics. 

What are your top priorities?

Our priorities have evolved throughout the course of the epidemic in Massachusetts. Early on, our priority was supporting hospitals and frontline responders to establish onsite qPCR tests, making sure that hospitals could diagnose symptomatic cases of high priority.

As large-scale testing through commercial diagnostic platforms came online, our priorities shifted toward supporting the diagnostic R&D pipeline, highlighting emerging technologies, including both viral nucleic acid and antibody-based tests, in order to radically expand the use and availability of diagnostic tests. We also focused on understanding consumer needs, and on bringing the best technologies closer to the consumer, while being sensitive to the different needs of the diverse populations being served.

Now, we are simultaneously focusing on facilitating the implementation of diagnostic tests for broader testing and surveillance of individuals who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, and for those who otherwise might not be detected. As the pandemic continues, we are thinking creatively to expand the scope of surveillance.

What are some concrete examples of how your task force is pursuing activities that are not “science as usual”?

We bring together a diverse community of stakeholders representing many parts of the COVID testing challenge, to learn from each other and forge creative solutions together. This includes clinical and public health microbiology labs on the front lines, R&D technologists driving cheaper, simpler, more effective diagnostic technologies, health professionals looking to improve safety for the populations they serve, health policy professors from across the country, and more.

We also established the MassCPR Sample Access Accelerator to facilitate access to clinical COVID samples for diagnostic R&D testing. This accelerator is open to all researchers at MassCPR member institutions, and is serving the needs of researchers across the greater Boston and Massachusetts community.

We’re also facilitating a “bake-off” between new diagnostic platforms being developed by many different R&D groups, to determine how these technologies perform compared to each other and to gold-standard diagnostic tests. This evaluation will drive improvements and enable us to select the best technologies for the many different implementation scenarios where testing is critical.

What are some early signs of progress or upcoming milestones?

By creating a platform for multidisciplinary collaboration, our community was able to support hospitals and research centers as they established diagnostic testing early in the epidemic in Massachusetts. This effort allowed for rapid response for our citizens. We are now facilitating connections between R&D researchers and commercial entities, to enable new tests to quickly move from the lab bench to the real world. We are also supporting communities and institutions as they consider testing strategies to be able to reopen safely.

What are some ways that your task force’s activities might influence real-world COVID strategies, such as clinical care, public policy, and reopening strategies?

Diagnostic testing is critical to virtually all real-world COVID strategies, including clinical care decision making, public health and policy, and reopening strategies. Our collaborative community represents all aspects of this effort, from implementing the earliest clinical testing, improving and scaling up testing strategies, and now looking ahead to reopening. The energy, inspired thinking, and impact of the Diagnostics Working Group will surely enable additional responses as we continue to grapple with COVID-19, and we’re optimistic that it can extend to serve other infectious disease threats in the future.

— Stanley Shaw, MD, PhD

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A selection of published articles and preprints from the MassCPR Diagnostics Task Force:

• Rapid Implementation of a SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Quantitative Real-Time PCR Test with Emergency Use Authorization at a Large Academic Safety Net Hospital (Murphy Lab)
• SARS-Cov2 Clinical Diagnostics: Academic Scientists Take on the COVID-19 Pandemic (Murphy Lab)
• Integrated sample inactivation, amplification, and Cas13-based detection of SARS-CoV-2 (Sabeti Lab)
• Massively multiplexed nucleic acid detection with Cas13 (Sabeti Lab)
• An enhanced isothermal amplification assay for viral detection (Springer Lab)
• Ultra-Sensitive High-Resolution Profiling of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies for Detecting Early Seroconversion in COVID-19 Patients (Walt Lab)
• Nanoswitch-linked immunosorbent assay (NLISA) for fast, sensitive, and specific protein detection (Wong Lab)
• DNA nanoswitches: a quantitative platform for gel-based biomolecular interaction analysis (Wong Lab)