With the help of a $15.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Emory, Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta have come together to facilitate the NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program.
The program selects and tests the most promising COVID diagnostic tools and helps them move quickly through the development and commercialization pipeline with the goal of making simple tests available for Americans to use at home, in a physician’s office or in other non-hospital settings.
While the facility celebrated its official opening on April 27, the collaboration has been up and running since last year.
“The RADx program has enrolled nearly 10,000 adult and pediatric participants,” says Greg Martin, MD, MSc, one of the Atlanta team’s three principal investigators and professor of pulmonary and critical care with the Emory School of Medicine Department of Medicine and chair of critical care for the Grady Health System. “We’ve built an important database that will enable us to develop ‘multi-flex tests’ as a next step, so that people can use these tests in their homes to determine if their symptoms are due to flu, COVID or something else.”
