DANVILLE, Pa., July 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Geisinger researchers have concluded there is sufficient evidence to consider including DNA changes that cause neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in genomic screening programs.

Geisinger is a leader in population-based genomic screening, and its MyCode Community Health Initiative is the only such research program that routinely returns clinically relevant results to patient-participants. The Geisinger team discovered that close to 1 percent of the more than 250,000 individuals enrolled in MyCode have a DNA change that is known to cause learning disorders, autism spectrum disorder, epilepsy, or other psychiatric illnesses. By analyzing electronic health record data, the research team determined that up to 70 percent of these individuals had a related clinical symptom documented, but most were unaware of their underlying genetic diagnosis.

The team published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatry on July 22.

"Our results show that DNA changes that cause certain brain conditions are at least as common as those that cause some cancers and cardiac diseases that are already being screened for in similar population-based DNA screening programs," said Christa Lese Martin, Ph.D., associate chief scientific officer for Geisinger and professor and director of the Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute. "When we talked with participants about their medical history and found that such a significant proportion had symptoms related to their genetic diagnosis, they shared that the genetic results 'medicalized' what they had been dealing with their whole lives."

When presented with their screening results, a subset of more than 140 patients responded positively and found the information to be valuable. Participants frequently noted that the DNA results helped them understand their own medical and personal history related to the conditions being studied, and many intended to share their results with family members since these DNA changes can be inherited.

"These DNA results are likely to have had a large impact on health and wellbeing throughout life for these individuals," said Karen E. Wain, MS, assistant professor for Geisinger's Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute. "It is important to know how people feel about these results, for themselves and their family, so we can ensure they have access to their genetic information with appropriate support."

Advances in genetic testing have made it possible to identify a genetic cause of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in more than 40 percent of individuals tested. However, most testing is ordered for children with developmental concerns and is rarely offered to adult patients with intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions. The Geisinger team noted that only about 6 percent of individuals in their study had received a genetic diagnosis through clinical testing. This indicates that many people who could benefit from genomic information have not had access to this information, and that their health care providers have not been informed of the additional health risks that the genomic result confers.

"There is an important care gap and knowledge gap when it comes to genetic testing in adults with neuropsychiatric conditions," said David Ledbetter, Ph.D., executive vice president and chief scientific officer for Geisinger. "We hope the positive clinical and personal utility seen in our MyCode population will help to encourage broader use of genetic testing in adults with these conditions."

About GeisingerGeisinger is committed to making better health easier for the more than 1.5 million consumers it serves. Founded more than 100 years ago by Abigail Geisinger, the system now includes 13 hospital campuses, a 600,000-member health plan, two research centers and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. With 32,000 employees and 1,800 employed physicians, Geisinger boosts its hometown economies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey by billions of dollars annually. Learn more atgeisinger.org or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

CONTACT: Ashley Andyshak Hayes717-972-4043arandyshakhayes@geisinger.edu

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DNA changes that cause neuropsychiatric disorders should be included in genomic screening programs, researchers say - BioSpace

As 2020 has demonstrated, the stock market can move in any direction in the short term. But as historical stock market data suggest, the stock market wields rock-solid wealth-building potential in the long run. That's why individual investors are best served by adopting a long-term mindset with a buy-and-hold strategy.

There are a number of ways to go about it. Most portfolios should own a collection of blue chip stocks, even if that simply relies on indexing, although buy-and-hold investing doesn't have to be boring. After all, investors that held onto today's blue-chip businesses before they were trendy have enjoyed awesome returns thanks to the power of compound interest.

With that in mind, investors might want to take a closer look at Dicerna Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:DRNA) and Fate Therapeutics (NASDAQ:FATE). The two development-stage biopharmas have much to prove, but these pharma stocks could appreciate considerably in the coming decades.

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First-generation cell therapies were based on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, or CAR-T. While the approach has plenty of room for improvement, CAR-T cells have several notable drawbacks. For instance, the cell type isn't ideal for treating solid tumor cancers. Additionally, harvesting immune cells from each individual patient is a cost- and labor-intensive process that delays treatment. This all suggests it's worth exploring other immune cells as the starting point for next-generation cell therapies and new production methods, at the very least to augment the capabilities of CAR-T.

Fate Therapeutics is all-in on that line of thinking. Most of the company's 13 unique pipeline programs are based on natural killer (NK) cells, which have inherent advantages compared to other types of cell therapies. NK cells can target solid tumor cancer cells, rally the rest of the immune system to reduce tumor burden, and be dosed multiple times. The latter feature creates many new treatment opportunities, such as driving longer durations of response or being used in combination with other cell therapies.

The development-stage business has also taken the "next-generation" label seriously. Rather than harvest immune cells from patients -- a long, complicated, expensive, and risky procedure -- the company is pursuing an off-the-shelf strategy. In other words, most of the pipeline candidates are grown from master cell lines, which allows each cell therapy to be genetically engineered with reproducible edits and to be produced in batches. Fate Therapeutics estimates its approach would save weeks during crucial treatment windows and drop the cost of treatment from $425,000 per dose to just $2,500 per dose. Better yet, the approach is cell-type agnostic, meaning it can be applied to NK cells and CAR-T cells.

Although the early stage pipeline lacks concrete data for investors to digest, there are a handful of significant partnerships that boost the company's credentials. Fate Therapeutics has a collaboration with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen that could be worth up to $3 billion in milestone payments, a collaboration with ONO Pharmaceutical that could be worth over $1.3 billion in milestone payments, and a partnership with Inscripta providing access to next-generation gene-editing tools.

Fate Therapeutics ended March with $204 million in cash, which is sufficient to get the business through several data readouts from early clinical trials. If the results suggest the cell therapy approach has merit, then the biopharma stock should earn a higher valuation. Given the ambitious volume of assets -- 13 unique pipeline programs is very large for a development-stage company -- no single failure should have a disastrous effect on the stock price. Investors with a long-term mindset should give this company a closer look.

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Gene editing and gene therapies gobble up most of the attention when it comes to genetic medicines, but investors shouldn't forget about RNA interference (RNAi). The gene-silencing technique encountered some stumbles in the past two decades, but a few simple tweaks to how the therapeutic payload is delivered into cells appears to have resurrected the technology's intriguing potential.

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals is one of the leading investment opportunities in the space. On the one hand, the company hasn't commercialized a single pipeline asset and is relatively far behind RNAi peers Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, the company ended March with half its market cap in cash and partnerships with six of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies.

That includes an unusual collaboration with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. The duo reached an agreement to co-develop competing drug candidates for alpha-1 liver disease, in which Dicerna Pharmaceuticals has the right to develop Alnylam's ALN-AAT02 and its own DCR-A1AT. The RNAi competitor-collaborators also agreed to share intellectual property for their pulmonary hypertension (PH) programs. Hefty royalties -- in both directions -- are the bounty for success.

That's not the only intriguing partnership in the pipeline. Dicerna Pharmaceuticals and Roche are developing an experimental treatment aimed at chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infections. The asset is likely being developed as a functional cure for the disease, which would follow in the footsteps of an RNAi combination therapy from peer Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals. A safe and effective functional cure for CHB could generate tens of billions of dollars in lifetime sales.

Despite the early stage nature of the pipeline, investors cannot overlook the potential of the RNAi medicines being developed by Dicerna Pharmaceuticals. The gene-silencing approach could carve out and maintain dominant market positions in various indications. Market shares might change when curative gene editing tools and gene therapies arrive, although that could take much longer than many investors expect due to several technical obstacles facing the hyped-up approaches. Investors looking for a contrarian pick in genetic medicine might want to give serious consideration to this biopharma stock.

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Written by Pooja Pillai | New Delhi | Updated: July 27, 2020 12:22:45 am Henrietta Lacks historical marker in Clover, Virginia. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In the coming week (on August 1) is the birth centenary of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who made one of the most significant contributions to modern medical science without her knowledge or consent.

The story of Lacks and the HeLa cell line that was harvested from her and which still forms the basis of a lot of medical research isimportant for an understanding of the ethical issues in medical research on human subjects. This is especially so right now, given the urgency to develop an effective COVID-19 vaccine, which requires that it be tested on human cells.

Who was Henrietta Lacks?

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman, who, according toThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks(2010, Crown) by Rebecca Skloot, grew up on a tobacco farm in rural Virginia. She was married to David Lacks and had five children.

Also Read | In Covid year, why unsung heroine of DNA Rosalind Franklin needs to be remembered

On January 29, 1951, she visited the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, for the diagnosis and treatment of a lump in her abdomen. It turned out to be an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Lacks died at the age of 31 on October 4, 1951.

What is HeLa and whats so special about it?

When Lacks was at John Hopkins, her tumour was biopsied and tissues from this were used for research by Dr George Otto Gey, the head of the Tissue Culture Laboratory at the hospital. The cells were found to be growing at a remarkable rate, doubling in count in 24 hours. Their astonishing growth rate made them ideal for mass replication for use in medical research.

Prior to this, researchers had attempted to immortalise human cells in vitro, but the cells always eventually died. The HeLa cells named after the donor were the first ones to be successfully immortalised.

How have HeLa cells advanced medical science?

The HeLa cell line is one of the most important cell lines in the history of medical science and has been the foundation for some of the most significant advances in this field.

HeLa cells were the first human cells to be successfully cloned and were used by Jonas Salk to test the polio vaccine. Significantly, they helped in identifying the human papilloma virus (HPV) as being the main cause of many forms of cervical cancer including the one that killed Lacks and were instrumental in the development of the HPV vaccine, which won its creator, Harald zur Hausen, the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008.

Theyve been used widely in cancer research and were used to establish that human cells contain 23 pairs of chromosomes, not 24, as previously thought.

When was Lacks recognised as the donor of the HeLa cells?

Lacks was an unwitting donor; neither she, nor her family were aware that her cells had been extracted and were to be used for medical research. Lacks was a poor, uneducated Black woman and her consent was not considered necessary by the medical establishment at the time.

Also Read | Meet Dr Sarah Gilbert, one of the scientists leading the race to find a coronavirus vaccine

While thousands of studies and developments worth many billions of dollars happened due to the HeLa cells, Lacks herself was only acknowledged as their source in the 1970s when researchers sought blood samples from her family. Moreover, her descendants had no control over the cell line until 2013, when the National Institutes of Health arrived at an agreement with them, granting them a degree of control over how Lacks genetic material was to be used.

Race and non-ethical medical research

In 1947, during the Nuremberg Trials, the Allied forces developed what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code, a set of 10 ethical principles for human experimentation. The code was created in response to the German experiments on human subjects during World War II and the first principle it enshrined was that voluntary consent was essential in human experimentation.

By the time Lacks cells were harvested and used without her consent, the code had been in existence for four years. Unfortunately, the violation of Lacks consent was only the latest chapter in a long history of medical research which has scorned ethics as far as non-white bodies are concerned.

Take the case of J Marion Sims, the 19th century physician who is often called the father of modern gynecology. He pioneered the surgical treatment of the vesicovaginal fistula, a common complication of childbirth in which a tear develops between the bladder and vaginal wall, causing pain, infection and urine leakage. Sims performed his surgical experiments on Alabama slaves, without their consent and without the benefit of anaesthesia.

Or consider the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, conducted by the US Public Health Service, from 1932 to 72, which examined how untreated syphilis progressed through African American men and how different it was from the way it affected white men.

Alabamas Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) was recruited for the study and the subjects 399 were infected patients and 201 uninfected control patients were all poor sharecroppers. While treatment with arsenic, bismuth and mercury was initially part of the study, the subjects were later given no treatment at all. Even after penicillin began to be widely available for use in treatment of syphilis in the 1940s, it was withheld from the subjects of the Tuskegee study. More than 100 are believed to have died; the study finally ended only after public exposure in the Washington Star.

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Unethical, non-consensual experiments on human subjects took place elsewhere too; in 2013, food historian Ian Mosby revealed highly unethical nutritional experiments conducted by the Canadian government on Aboriginal children in six residential schools between 1942 and 52.

As part of the study, malnourished children were denied adequate nutrition; parents were neither informed, nor was their consent sought.

In 2004, a senate inquiry into the experiences of Australian Aboriginal children forced into state care similarly revealed their use in medical experiments and trials, from the 1920s till as late as 1970.

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Explained: How a Black woman saved lives without her consent and without due acknowledgement - The Indian Express

Black and Hispanic residents are more likely than white residents to become infected by the coronavirus and Black residents are more likely to die from it. Dr. Sherita Hill Golden, vice president and chief diversity officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine, talked with me this week about why that is the case.

She discussed the impact of systemic racism, dispelled some myths and highlighted ways health care institutions and government can respond to make a difference.

Here are the highlights of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tim Nickens: Statistics show Black and Hispanic residents are more likely to become infected by the COVID-19 virus and more likely to die from it. Why is that?

Dr. Sherita Hill Golden, vice president and chief diversity officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine (Courtesy: Johns Hopkins Medicine)

Dr. Sherita Hill Golden: There are several contributing factors. I think of them in three buckets, and two of them are historical. One is that there are historical practices that were embedded in our medical and health care environments. During slavery, African American slaves were often experimented upon without their consent and without anesthesia. Even in modern-day medicine, there are some erroneous beliefs that somehow Blacks are more tolerant of pain and need less pain medication. Thats an example of a bias that still exists in the health care system that results in inadequate pain control during hospitalization.

There were also situations like the Guatemala syphilis experiment (in the 1940s) and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (from the 1930s to 1972) where Hispanics and African Americans were withheld treatment so scientists could learn the natural history of syphilis. The Tuskegee experiment wasnt uncovered until 1972. Thats fairly recent in our countrys history. All of those things led to a distrust among minority populations of our medical system.

At the turn of the last century, there were also racial and ethnic groups that were considered biologically inferior to others African Americans, Latinos, and recent immigrants to the U.S. We know today that is absolutely not true. There is no scientific foundation that there are any groups that are genetically inferior to others.

All of those things have contributed to minority patients experiencing bias in the health care system resulting in less likelihood of seeking care and poor experiences in the health care setting. So we now have African American and Latino patients who may be getting sick but not coming into the health care system because they may have had poor experiences before, or coming to the health care system and not being believed when they are presenting symptoms of COVID-19.

Second, there is a social context, policies that have been in place in our country that started after the Civil War era that have contributed to structural and institutional racism in things like housing, jobs and education. African Americans were coming from the South to settle in cities in the north, and a lot of those neighborhoods would become redlined and African Americans were often subjected to predatory loans. City governments would stop investing in public works in those neighborhoods, stop investing in the school system, and stop investing in economic development. So today we have neighborhoods that still have a lot of housing instability, food insecurity where there isnt access to healthy foods, and a lack of access to parks for physical activity and recreation. We know those factors increase the risk of chronic diseases that have been associated with COVID-19.

The third bucket is that African American and Latino residents are more likely to be working in jobs in the service sector that are considered essential during the pandemic the food service industry, environmental services, security, public transportation. They have had to continue to go to work, often without proper personal protective equipment, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, so they were more likely to be exposed. Many of them are also living in crowded, multigenerational housing.

All of those things contribute to increased COVID exposure. Then if the population is also more likely to have a risk of diabetes, heart disease and lung disease because of these historical issues, and on top of that they are more likely to be exposed to and infected by COVID, that is going to result in worse outcomes. Its not so much that these diseases make you more susceptible to infection; its that they contribute to a poorer outcome once you get infected.

Nickens: Does it frustrate you that some believe Black and Hispanic residents are more likely to be infected by COVID-19 because of genetics?

Golden: Theres nothing genetic about being housing insecure, food insecure, or living in an environment where you have exposure to chemicals that increase your risk of chronic diseases. Those are social and institutional contributors to health that have nothing to do with a persons genetics.

Nickens: Are the lifestyle changes needed to guard against the virus harder to make in poorer neighborhoods?

Golden: They can be. Fortunately, now there are all kinds of masks available. Washing your hands frequently is critical. But if you are living in crowded housing, it can make social distancing difficult to impossible.

One thing important to recognize in the African American community is that everybody who is dying from COVID is not low-income and living in these types of circumstances. There are well-off African Americans who also have diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular disease who are dying from COVID. Even when you are in a situation where you can implement those public health practices, this population is still very much at risk.

Nickens: A lot has been written about historical stress contributing to this situation.

Golden: I think it is a significant contributor. African Americans are more likely to contract COVID and more likely to die. The Hispanic population is more likely to get COVID, but the death rate is not as high and is closer to that of white people. Part of the reason is that Hispanics who are getting infected are younger. But I also think the difference is that African Americans have been exposed to generational stress that results from dealing with discrimination in every aspect of life. Our Latino immigrant community has come to the U.S. more recently, so there hasnt been the same amount of time for that chronic stress to perhaps have as significant impact in terms of mortality.

We really should be thinking about how we eliminate that discriminatory stress for all of our vulnerable communities.

Nickens: What have you seen from the government and the medical community that has been effective in helping people of color and low-income communities deal with the virus?

Golden: Meeting people where they are in the community is key. Those who are undocumented immigrants dont have access to all of the usual benefits that citizens have. In Baltimore, we have established partnerships with community organizations and corporations to get meals delivered to them. We are also using our Johns Hopkins excess testing capacity to provide mobile testing in the community where there are hot spots.

If you are partnering with trusted community partners, they can also help you with contact tracing. People are often uncomfortable about wanting to say who they have been in contact with, but we have to know who they have been in contact with if they are infected so that we can make quarantine and isolation recommendations to stop the spread of the virus.

Nickens: Do you have any hope for positive structural change to come out of this pandemic as these disparities are highlighted?

Golden: Ive been a doctor for 26 years. When youre in medical school, youre told you are going to use this medicine to treat this disease and the patient is going to get better. Then you start practicing, and you realize there are all of these extraneous factors that contribute to the ability of the patient to get the medicine and to take the medicine. We have to really think about how we use our policies and legislation to address these structural, social determinants of health.

One fire hydrant is required for so many houses in a neighborhood. It seems like for so many houses, there should be a store where you can get affordable fresh fruits and vegetables and healthy food. How do we use our power of legislation to address these issues? As we think about good health, much of this needs to happen in collaboration with the health care system but also outside of it. Thats a very different way of thinking than when I was in medical school in the early 90s.

Nickens: From the news coverage you have seen on racial disparities regarding the virus, are there any particular points where the coverage is off-base or where journalists could be more thoughtful about how they approach the issue?

Golden: It is important for journalists to report on and raise awareness about the contribution of structural racism to the social determinants of health that are foundational to the disparities in COVID-19 and the chronic medical conditions that worsen outcomes from COVID-19. This will prevent reporting suggesting that it is just the chronic diseases and that it is the fault of the vulnerable populations for making poor health choices. I recall seeing such reports early during the pandemic, and they were very upsetting because they assume that everyone lives in an environment where they can make healthy choices; unfortunately, that is not the case.

It is also important to emphasize that it is not only poor African Americans who are dying from COVID-19 but also those who are adequately resourced, further shedding light on the generational impact of racism and the resulting stress on health.

Nickens: What have we missed in this conversation?

Golden: Im an African American physician. I have been shocked by how many people have died from COVID-19. Im flabbergasted that we could have this many deaths and a quarter of them are in my own community. My husband and I both know people who have had COVID-19 or have died from it. Its horrible, but if it can actually wake us up to think about what we really need to do to deliver adequate care to people and advocate for environmental justice, that would be a great outcome.

Dr. Sherita Hill Golden is vice president and chief diversity officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her expertises include cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, diabetes mellitus, endocrinology and lipid disorders.

Tim Nickens recently retired as editor of editorials for the Tampa Bay Times. He and a colleague won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing that successfully persuaded Pinellas County to resume adding fluoride to drinking water. This is part of a series funded by a grant from the Rita Allen Foundation to report and present stories about the disproportionate impact of the virus on people of color, Americans living in poverty and other vulnerable groups.

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Why Black and Hispanic residents are more likely to become infected by the coronavirus - Poynter

As the U.S. deals with massive delays in COVID-19 testing, doctors and scientists say another type of diagnostic test could alleviate the stress on labs. Rapid, or point-of-care, tests deliver results in just minutes, while lab-based tools can take days.

"Every day they wait is another day they need to quarantine, or if they're not, it's another day they could be infecting other people," Dr. Keith Jerome, who directs the molecular virology lab at the University of Washington medical school, said in an interview. "If you're getting results within 20 minutes, you can start taking the appropriate actions right away."

The National Institutes of Health announced Wednesday what it called an "unprecedented effort" to ramp up testing technology. Funded by $1.5 billion in federal stimulus money, the program will focus on creating rapid tests and distributing them more widely.

It's also being called for by lawmakers and top federal health officials. President Donald Trump promised more rapid testing during his briefing Tuesday. And Dr. Brett Giroir, who is overseeing the nation's COVID-19 testing, said this month that he expected 5 million additional "point-of-care" tests in July, with a goal of 20 million or more by September.

The tests produce such quick results because samples aren't sent off to labs. Instead, they're inserted directly into a machine housed at a doctor's office or a hospital. The machine does the entire analysis, so instead of hours, it takes just minutes to get results similar to rapid flu or strep tests used by most doctors.

Six point-of-care tests are authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, including two antigen tests, which look for certain proteins in the virus rather than genetic material.

As promising as the rapid tests seem to be, a significant problem prevents more doctors and clinicians from using them. Most aren't as accurate as lab-based tests, and, in some cases, they can have shockingly high rates of false negatives.

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Joseph Petrosino, director of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, compares it to eating at a fast-food joint.

"If you go to a gourmet restaurant, you don't expect your meal to be ready in five minutes," he said. "But if you're on the go and you eat fast food, the quality of food is usually a sacrifice, compared to the gourmet restaurant. That's the same thing in the testing world."

One of the more popular rapid tests, Abbott Labs' ID NOW point-of-care test, which promises results in as little as five minutes and was once touted by the White House, came under fire in recent weeks after a small study found that it returned false negatives for nearly 50 percent of certain samples compared to a rival test. While other studies found more accurate results, it was enough for the FDA to issue an alert in May. The agency has received 147 adverse event reports about the test.

"The reality is that trying to do this really fast the combination of fast and sensitive turns out to be really a challenge," said Dr. Christopher Polage, director of the clinical microbiology laboratory at Duke University Health System.

Polage said COVID-19 testing is a lengthy process. In the lab, scientists use special reagents that amplify or copy a sample's genetic material to test for the virus. The process takes several hours. When you try to short-cut it for a rapid test, you can end up trading off the test's sensitivity.

"No patient is ever going to wait at a clinic for eight hours," Polage said. "So it's really difficult and, in some cases, impossible to get an equivalent result in a fraction of the time."

Jerome said, "You have to really keep in mind that there is a trade-off that you've made for that speed, and the trade-off is they're not as sensitive, which means they're going to miss some people who actually have COVID and tell them COVID isn't there."

A point-of-care test made by Cepheid Inc. of Sunnyvale, California, which gives results in about an hour, has been shown to be nearly as accurate as lab-based tests. But scientists say that the machine is expensive and that, as with some lab-based tests, some of the reagents it uses are in short supply.

"If you can wait an hour, you can get really good results," Jerome said. "The issue with those has been just shortages of reagents, and the machine itself is just not available enough that everybody can have one." He said UW Medicine, the health care system affiliated with the University of Washington, can use it only in the emergency room, where it needs to quickly test trauma patients so doctors and nurses know what kind of protective gear they need to wear.

But some doctors say that instead of focusing on rapid tests, which are notoriously difficult to perfect both rapid strep and flu tests also have issues with accuracy the U.S. should focus on fixing capacity issues with lab-based tests, which are being slowed in part because of supply shortages.

"We have the equipment, but we can't get the reagents," Jerome said. "We did a little over 7,000 tests yesterday in my laboratory. But we could have done 7,000 more if we had full allotments of reagents."

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The delays in testing have a real impact for people like Frank Borsa, 55, who anxiously waited for days to find out whether he was infected after he returned to Brooklyn, New York, from Miami.

"It's really frustrating," Borsa said while he was still waiting for the results. "I've called repeatedly. What you get is 'it's taking a little bit longer.' It's very difficult, because you don't know how to go forward."

He finally got his results 12 days after he took the test at a New York City urgent care center. He was negative. But he said he now understands what the hubbub around testing is all about.

"Even though there might be hundreds of thousands of tests performed per day, if people are not getting their results, this is never going to end," he said. "The communication is there's tons of tests. But if there's no results, what good is it?"

Originally posted here:

COVID-19 tests: There's an insurmountable backlog of virus tests. A rapid test could help. - NBC News