iSpecimen Inc., an online marketplace for human biospecimens, announced the expansion of its supplier capabilities with the addition of a reference lab in New York to support commercial and government customers focused on COVID-19 research, including analyzing the Omicron and Delta variants. The reference lab, a recent addition to the iSpecimen supplier network, has the capacity to sequence hundreds of COVID-19 positive swabs per week, providing data that is crucial in the fight against the virus. This lab is sequencing the most recent swabs to identify new variants of COVID-19 as the virus continues to progress globally.
“The sequencing of nasal swabs is necessary to determine which variant a patient has tested positive for and provides variant-positive specimens for research,” said iSpecimen Founder and CEO, Christopher Ianelli, MD, Ph.D. “Through our relationship with this reference lab, we are able to quickly and efficiently support both commercial and government researchers working day and night to battle COVID-19.”
For researchers looking to validate their own variant identification assays, iSpecimen can obtain sequenced and unsequenced COVID-19 positive and negative swabs in a variety of media types. To learn more about COVID-19 specimens at iSpecimen, please visit iSpecimen’s website at https://pages.ispecimen.com/COVID-19-Samples.html.
iSpecimen has been working diligently with the research community to understand COVID-19. In early 2020, iSpecimen began sending serum samples to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) to help researchers monitor antibody development for possible guidance on immunity. iSpecimen has provided the CDC with 600 SARS-CoV-2-positive serum samples and 100 negative serum samples. In addition, iSpecimen has provided other federal agencies and private companies custom COVID-19 collections, which are often complex and complement the more immediate availability of remnant or banked samples. Overall, iSpecimen has delivered more than 15,000 specimens for more than 200 COVID-related projects since the start of the pandemic.