But Columbia University and biopharmaceutical company Sorrento Therapeutics announced on Wednesday that they intend to bring to market a COVID-19 saliva-based diagnostic test with a 30-minute turnaround—called the COVI-TRACE—after initial clinical studies were first published last month on the non-peer-reviewed preprint server medRxiv…

“This technology is about accuracy and speed,” said Dr. Henry Ji, CEO of Sorrento, who claimed that the test’s clinical sensitivity has been measured at 97 percent, with its specificity at 100 percent. Those are two of the indicators most often used to demonstrate a test’s efficacy, though the prototype has so far been used only on a pool of 60 samples.

By speed, Ji explained, he means both the turnaround of the results, and the pace with which the company could potentially scale up manufacturing to produce them on a large scale. The idea is that they may require less complicated equipment, less shipping, and—like the researchers from Colorado claim about their own model—be less likely to hit the wall of backlogs, lab staffing, and supply chain shortages that have plagued the predominant iteration of diagnostic tests.