By Tom Cech
I’ve been immersed in the new book by Walter Isaacson, modestly titled “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.” Multiple pages describe Jennifer’s leadership in launching COVID-19 testing on the Berkeley campus. There’s no question that Jennifer’s scientific acumen, compassion, team-building prowess and rock-star influence in the Bay Area science community made a huge difference in establishing high-throughput testing at UC-Berkeley.
Yet, reading that section of the book, I was struck by Isaacson’s lost opportunity. Faculty, postdocs and students “filling the void” and establishing COVID-19 testing was not unique to Berkeley. It happened at universities around the country. And, we should be proud to note, it happened at CU Boulder.
When COVID-19 hit and our campus moved to remote instruction and research in March 2020, we all became painfully aware of the dearth of testing for the virus. Testing was needed for public health reasons – to allow containment of outbreaks, which could easily spread from the CU campus to the City of Boulder. The local hospitals were overwhelmed, requiring 3 days or sometimes a week to return results, and the federal government and the State of Colorado were providing little leadership.
The “Do it yourself” solution for CU Boulder was catalyzed by Prof. Sara Sawyer and her lab. Their research already involved monitoring flu virus in saliva, and they immediately saw that saliva could just as easily be tested for SARS-CoV-2. Saliva is relevant because it’s the way that COVID is transmitted (little droplets dispersed when you sneeze, cough, yell or sing), and it’s quicker, cheaper and less painful to collect than a nasal swab specimen. Saliva testing, however, was not FDA approved, so the tests organized by Berkeley, CU Boulder, and most other universities are called surveillance tests rather than diagnostic tests. If your saliva test comes out positive, you’re urged to get an FDA-approved diagnostic test.
BioFrontiers Director Roy Parker and his research group devised a reliable and sensitive Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) assay for SARS-CoV-2 from saliva, and Prof. Leslie Leinwand and Roy then went to the CU administration with a plan to scale up to a University-wide level. The CU administration cut through the normal red tape to order testing supplies and make funds available. Although Leslie and Roy understood the science of testing, they had no experience in the practical issues of setting up space and scheduling that could handle thousands of students, staff and faculty. Here Associate Vice Chancellor Jennifer Barrett McDuffie came to the rescue. Dr. Kristen Bjorkman provided leadership for collecting saliva samples at six sites, testing them in the BioFrontiers Institute, and reporting them quickly and accurately.
The testing lab became operational in August 2020, in time for the students arriving for the Fall Semester. This testing was essential for the safety of CU and our city – when cases inevitably arose, they were quickly contained, and effective contact tracing alerted those who might have been exposed. Cases did spike in September (the unfortunate Party on the Hill), but the spike was short lived. By now, Kristen and her crew have analyzed 185,000 individual saliva samples (185 L of saliva!), which includes 5,000 samples from family and household members.
A special feature of the CU Boulder program was the monitoring of effluent (notice my polite choice of words!) from CU’s dorms and correlating this with testing of individual dorm residents. Led by Prof. Cresten Mansfeldt, students tapped into the sewage lines of dormitories and tested for viral RNA. Remarkably, a single infected resident could be detected in a dorm’s effluent.
Campuses across the country each devised their own testing program, aided by much cross-institution sharing of ideas, protocols and data. Yes, it takes “rocket science” to understand how to perform accurate tests with viral RNA. But fortunately, major universities have rocket scientists who are up to the challenge.
Many who worked so tirelessly to create virus testing for CU Boulder did the extra work as an overload, unpaid, with no incentive other than “it’s the right thing to do.” They did the extra work at the expense of their own research, their progress towards their degree, their next grant application or publication. Yet they gained something — a tremendous sense of accomplishment, of teamwork, of camaraderie. They came to know faculty, students and staff from far ends of campus, who they hadn’t known existed, and they found them to be just as bright and energetic and committed as they were. The sharing, collaborative, generous spirit gave them confidence that, while the virus might slow us down, it would not put us down.
Thomas R. Cech, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Ph.D. Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also Colorado’s first Nobel Prize laureate (1989).
