Following Oceanit’s participation in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) shark tank, Oceanit was featured on Hawaii News Now and Hawaii Public Radio to talk about our ASSURE COVID-19 test development. ASSURE stands for ‘Accelerated Sensor Solution for Urgent Response to Epidemics for COVID-19’, which you can read more about here.
Visit KGMB Hawaii News Now to view the Oceanit ASSURE-19 segment here: https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/07/01/spit-test-could-be-covid-game-changer-says-honolulu-company/ and listen to CEO Patrick Sullivan’s call-in to Bytemarks on HPR here: https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/bytemarks-caf-keeping-covid-testing
NIH’s RADx program is a $1.5 Billion investment program to speed the development of quick, accessible, and novel COVID-19 tests. Oceanit presented to the NIH panel in June and we are now awaiting further notice regarding a decision on funding for our ASSURE project work. Oceanit’s “spit test” is a novel COVID-19 testing approach requires no blood samples, nasal swabs, or lab equipment with days-long waiting times. We measure our spit test results not in weeks, days, or even hours, but in minutes with 97% specificity to the COVID-19 virus.
“We proposed a simple Spit-in-A-Cup-Test that is fast, cheap and accurate, which could be used to simply test at home, at school, at work, or airports,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, Oceanit’s CEO. “It doesn’t require any equipment and produces a result in about 10 minutes. However, using our Image AI app, the result could arrive even faster, perhaps in just a few minutes. Our goal is to have this working on August 1st, but we will also have to clear the necessary testing and approval hurdles .”
At scale, the consumer cost of Oceanit’s COVID-19 spit test would be a few dollars per test and manufacturing could be ratcheted up quickly. The technology, developed by Oceanit, is a result of many years of research and development in Artificial Intelligence and genomics, and is being done in collaboration with multiple institutions, including the University of Hawaii, who has been an indispensable collaborator.
