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NIBIB-funded engineers have developed a flexible epidermal patch that can simultaneously and continuously monitor cardiac output and metabolic levels of glucose, lactate, caffeine, or alcohol. The patch is a major step towards continuous non-invasive health monitoring.

Two US counties will receive a surge of free, rapid, at-home Covid-19 tests in an effort to study how people use them and how that impacts Covid-19 trends in the community, according to an announcement Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health. Source: CNN.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health announced a new initiative on Wednesday to help determine whether frequent, widespread use of rapid coronavirus test slows the spread of the virus. Source: The News Times.

Researchers have generated synthetic mucins with a polymer backbone that more accurately mimics the structure and function of naturally occurring mucins. They also showed that these synthetic mucins could effectively neutralize the bacterial toxin that causes cholera.

The CDC, in collaboration with the NIH, has launched an innovative community health initiative called “Say Yes! COVID Test.” Up to 160,000 residents in two US communities will have access to free, rapid antigen tests that they can administer themselves to use three times a week for one month.

Sickle cell disease is the most prevalent inherited blood disorder in the world, affecting 70,000 to 100,000 Americans. However, it is considered an orphan disease, meaning it impacts less than 200,000 people nationally, and is therefore underrepresented in therapeutic research.

ROSALIND, a software leader in extracting meaningful insights from diverse pools of life science data, today announced the launch of a web-based platform for monitoring the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants and evaluating the effects on the performance of diagnostic tests. The new platform, called the ROSALIND Diagnostic Monitoring (DxM) system, is available starting today and will be used by diagnostic test manufacturers and regulators to monitor assay performance against the rapidly evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants. Source: Business Wire.

NIH has awarded four additional contracts for the development and scaled-up manufacturing of new COVID-19 diagnostic testing technologies through its Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Tech (RADx) initiative. The awards total $29.3 million and will help increase testing capacity for COVID-19.

The development and authorization of COVID-19 POC and at-home tests has been remarkable; a process that can often take more than a year took only a few months in many cases. We believe that lessons learned from our experiences with COVID-19 could be leveraged to facilitate a large-scale effort for swift, widespread access to accurate and reliable tests for a variety of diseases. Source: Health Affairs.