UMBC finalists for the Rapid Testing Innovation Award

During the COVID-19 pandemic’s early and deadliest days last year, health authorities were plagued by a lack of testing, long wait times for results, and an ambiguous picture of what was generating outbreaks. Many public health experts are still dealing with the same challenges more than a year and a half later into the pandemic. Therefore, the need of the hour is a self-administered test that is accurate, simple-to-run, and detects COVID-19 cases within minutes. Here we develop a direct POC lateral flow assay devoid of an RNA isolation and amplification step to detect positive COVID-19 cases within 10 minutes.