Test Ahead of the Rest

How fast action, leadership and COLSA’s biomedical expertise is helping UNH fight COVID-19

Six months later, Hubbard Chair of Biological Sciences and Professor Kelley Thomas says there are still no words to describe how he felt the first time he flipped the lights on in UNH’s proprietary COVID-19 testing lab last fall. After months of working around the clock with his team to establish the facility, the director of the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies looked around at the PCR instruments and the high throughput robotic pipetting stations. Students were back on campus. Samples were coming in to be tested. What they’d set out to do was working.

“There’s no practicing this,” says Thomas, who serves as the lab’s scientific director. “You can’t say, ‘send me 4,000 samples so we can try this out.’”

That meant starting off the semester by going from zero to 4,000. As in zero actual tests over the summer months to processing up to 4,000 in a day.

But nothing less than that incredible velocity would suffice. Rick Cote, director of the Center of Integrated Biomedical and Bioengineering Research, professor and COLSA faculty fellow for research and graduate education, is a member of the university planning team responsible for building out the facility. He says that the lab’s capacity to test with scale, precision and efficiency — right from the get-go — was crucial, in large part because it provides the data that makes effective contact tracing possible in the first place.

“Safety, quality, efficiency,” Thomas explains, is the lab’s motto for being able to test everyone on campus — often.

Early on in the process of developing the lab’s design and protocols, Thomas, Cote and their cohort of experts made the decision to move forward with a specific type of test: RT-PCR, which is short for reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction.

Thomas says that this test is the gold standard in molecular diagnostics because it’s both sensitive and robust. Probes swiftly identify the virus’s fingerprint in a small test sample by binding and copying its unique strands of genetic material. Since the RNA of COVID-19 continues to adapt and shift, the test actually looks for three different genes, bolstering its accuracy.

“It’s like a fingerprint test that uniquely identifies not just the thumb, but also the first and second finger,” Cote explains.

Throughout the in-person part of the fall semester, which ran from August 31 to November 20, all students on campus tested themselves twice a week using a self-swabbing kit created by UNH. They then placed their barcoded test samples in drop boxes around campus that were

collected and delivered to the testing lab, which is located on the second floor of UNH’s Health and Wellness Center.

“Have you ever seen 600–800 test samples dumped out of a biohazard bag?” Thomas says. “That’s what was delivered to the lab six times daily all semester.”

For that reason, automating as much of the process as possible was a goal from the very beginning. Computational scientist Anthony Westbrook ’02, ’17G, ’24G in the UNH Hubbard Center for Genome Studies created the software to scan each test’s barcode and track it all the way through. Even with thousands of samples being tested every day, the tracking system allows them to pinpoint a single positive sample. There are also robots, which remove samples from tubes and place them on trays for testing.

Twenty COLSA alumni and current students are working in the lab, including Cassandra (Cassy) Amarello ’18, who graduated from UNH with a bachelor’s degree in genetics and is one of the lab’s technicians.

“I want to make a significant impact in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and help keep the general population of UNH safe,” says Amarello. “I have learned how a lab gets started from the bottom up and all the details that go into making a high-throughput diagnostic lab successful, and I have been able to use some of the newest, state-of-the art equipment involving sample processing. I am a part of an amazing team that is making an impact on the history of UNH.”

As of November 20, when most students headed home for Thanksgiving break and to finish their classes and take finals remotely, the UNH lab had completed nearly 273,000 tests for COVID-19. Combined with the weekly testing of faculty and staff by ConvenientMD, the university was able to quickly identify positive cases, isolate infected individuals and use contact tracing to quarantine those exposed. UNH’s COVID-19 testing and tracing program received national attention for its success in keeping on-campus instruction safe for the UNH community.

In December, the lab began providing testing for 30 long-term care facilities and shelters throughout New Hampshire. Along with the thousands of tests handled daily for the UNH community, the lab expects to process up to 1,000 tests a day for the state. With the acquisition of a state-of-the-art sequencer, the lab has also expanded its testing capabilities to identify newly emerging variants of the virus.

“Looking back, it’s amazing how the dedication and expertise of COLSA faculty and staff, as well as the exuberant participation of COLSA students and alumni, came together so quickly to help create this world-class molecular diagnostics lab,” Thomas says.