M. Jana Broadhurst, PhD, discussing the creation of the first effective COVID-19 test

18 May 2022

Jana Broadhurst: I don’t know if collaboration’s so much the right word, but a lot of getting on the phone [laughs] with our lab people, talking to lab people about how to select the right targets for the test and ensure that you are not detecting any of the common coronaviruses that are circulating around and really just understanding how to do this quickly and safely. So we were among many laboratories globally who were going through this process. We were unique in the US in that, right, we had this responsibility of caring for many of the first cases in the country before there was known community transition here in the US. So again, this is in some ways the bread and butter of our trade. We know how to do this, but we’re not often faced with this type of pressure and these sorts of stakes. There was plenty of people who were also very keen to learn from our early experience.
Emily Brush: But is it fair to say that your test was one of the first or the first successful test?
JB: Yeah.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives