More than two years into the pandemic, the virus that causes COVID—SARS-CoV-2—continues to spread worldwide. Testing for the virus and its variants can help limit transmission and inform treatment decisions, and is therefore an important pillar of the public health response. Now, a team of researchers from Princeton University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have created an easy-to-use diagnostic test for COVID infection that is more sensitive than the commonly used at-home antigen tests, and that also allows for the rapid and specific detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants in point-of-care settings. The study was published May 30, 2022 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. “Viral infections are often challenging to detect – as we all realized in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic,” said Cameron Myhrvold, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton. To read the full story.