Open design for +1 billion home tests per day

[AJP]

We need open source designs to scale up to +1 billion home tests per day.

We've already got an open 30 minute test from Mammoth biosciences (improvement on PCR)

We need to do this:

1.  Open source the RNA extraction kits

Preferably the companies release the designs (do you know someone high level in Qiagen, Roche, Thermofisher and can coerce them?  Please contact them.  (and preferably tell me too))

or

analytical chemists reverse engineering them (do you have a lab / mass spec and can do this?  Please reply.)

2.  Develop open protocol AND kit for everyone to home test on a regular basis (eventually daily). (please join)

Mammoth test is not great for home test kits due to RNA extraction step (complex and sensitive).

Antibody would probably be simpler.  Anyone exploring that in DIY / DIT land?

But maybe there's a way to make it work using a string & weight for home made centrifuge.  Or a balloon / syringe to make a pressure / vacuum.  Then dump contents onto the isothermal amplification and lateral flow detection strip.

Are there any other groups people know about working on this?  Either in gov, academia, industry or citizen science / DIY?

To be clear the goal is an open source description of all the steps needed so our global ChemEng / BioProcessing facilities could be easily turned into home test kit factories.  This isn't aimed at the current strain... it's aimed at the new strain in 2, 4 or 6 months time that's sweeping back through the population.

Cheers,

AJP

fyi, I'm helping run the Helpful Engineering group at projectopenair.org .  We've got 10,000 volunteers in the last 6 days.  We're being approached by $bn companies, and companies offering 100s of employees, gov officials etc for deploying solutions against this.

[AJP]

Just to be clear for anyone who might be confused; I'm referring to Corona virus home testing here.

Time may show this to be unnecessary; someone else does it (e.g. https://www.channel4.com/news/rapid-covid-19-self-testing-kit-set-for-uk-release )

Legals and finance that it's not possible; though bear in mind we have compulsory licensing and TRIPS.

But until then there's a group of DIT bio scientists working on this.

And we could do with help from an analytical chemist / those reagent manufacturers.

AJP