Jay Varma uses robots to speed up COVID-19 tests in New York
This week New York City turned to Opentrons, a company selling robots to laboratories, to speed up COVID-19 tests. Private laboratories were sending results to patients over a week later, rendering the results useless since patients could have a new infection by that time.
Delays are “…becoming a problem. We are seeing longer turnaround times from certain laboratories,” Jay Varma said at a press briefing in July. Delays at private labs occur because they conduct tests for the virus all over the country and, with a surge in cases outside New York, their lab capacity is limited. Varma, who is the senior health advisor to mayor Bill de Blasio, oversees the city’s testing program.
“We have paired experts in genetics and clinical diagnostics with cutting-edge automation and robotics that will allow us to deliver lab results to New Yorkers in 24 hours…The pace of our recovery (from the virus) will depend on the speed and accuracy of citywide testing,” said Opentrons chief executive Jon Brennan-Badal.
By November, when virus infections are expected to resurge and coincide with the flu season, Opentrons expects to carry out about 20,000 tests daily. This will triple the tests conducted by city controlled labs. At $28 per test, the cost will be less than a third charged by some private labs, Brennan-Badal told The New York Times. Opentrons costs are lower in part due to high volume and fewer use of reagents and other supplies.
The increased testing will help to open schools, more offices and enable restaurants to offer indoor dining in New York. The city has been hardest hit by COVID-19 in the U.S., with 239,306 cases and 23,335 deaths. The peak was on April 6, when the city had 6,377 new cases and 598 deaths the following day.
Yesterday, September 18, there were 37, 658 tests and 346 confirmed cases. The mayor recommends that residents get tested at least once a month. At this point, about 2% of the city’s population is tested every week and 4.3 million tests have been conducted in the city, so far.
The new lab has created about 100 jobs, including for technologists, automation engineers, and scientists. By November, the lab is expected to employ about 150. It will also boost the mayor’s efforts to attract more life science businesses to New York, for which the city committed $500 million in 2016.
Robots made by Brooklyn, New York-based Opentrons automate lab functions like pippeting, diluting and sample preparation. Robots start at $5,000 and are used by Stanford University, Imperial College, London, and others.
The new lab will “…give us control because this is a laboratory really dedicated to New York City,” Varma told The New York Times. Earlier, from 2011 to 2017, Varma was the city’s Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control. He directed the public health laboratory and all infectious disease control programs, including HIV, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections, vaccine-preventable diseases, and general communicable diseases.
Varma’s division employed more than 1100, had an annual budget of over US$ 350 million, and operated 17 clinical facilities. He built new programs for hepatitis C, advanced molecular diagnosis, and data management, and served as incident commander for nine city-wide emergencies.
From 2001 to 2011, he was at the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, working on foodborne diseases. He served in Bangkok and Beijing. A Captain in the US Public Health Service, he has received the two highest awards in the department.
Varma was a Senior Advisor for strategy and implementation to Africa CDC, in surveillance, supporting emergency preparedness and response, information systems, laboratory systems, and workforce development. He has authored 126 scientific manuscripts, six essays, and one book. Varma speaks fluent English and basic conversational Mandarin.
Varma completed medical school, internal medicine residency, and chief residency at the University of California, San Diego. He graduated magna cum laude, highest honors, from Harvard University.
Opentrons CEO Brennan-Badal was earlier the vice president of strategy at comiXology, which was bought by Amazon in 2014. He helped comiXology become the leading platform for discovering, buying, and reading digital comic books and become the top revenue generating non-game iPad app. Prior to comiXology, he was an analyst at Rose Tech Ventures. He graduated in history from Columbia Unversity.