Lab with the ability to test 10 000 for COVID-19

Swedish clinical lab based at the Biomedical Center in Uppsala are preparing to run 10 000 test per day for COVID-19 on behalf of the Swedish Public Health Authority.

In March the Swedish Government asked the Public Health Authority to develop a national strategy to increase the capacity to test people for COVID-19 in Sweden. Now a part of this large scale testing will be carried out by a lab in Uppsala called A23 Lab, which until only a few weeks ago was only carrying out testing  for prostate cancer. The prostate cancer testing is part of the OncoWatch project which is led by a team from Karolinska Institutet who are working on improvements for prostate cancer diagnostics and treatment by combining Big Data, AI and cloud-based technologies. The project team at Karolinska Institutet is also behind the commercialisation of the Stockholm3 test for prostate cancer.

EIT Health is funding part of the OncoWatch project, making it possible to implement and assess prototypes and fine-tune the product offerings and has played a key role in accelerating the development and implementation of Stockholm3 and the new AI system, OncoWatch through network and financial support.

It’s fantastic to see how quickly the team at A23 Lab has converted to a test lab for COVID-19,  employing a  similar method to the one they use when analyzing prostate cancer tests.

Read the full interview with the team, published in Dagens Nyheter on 14 April 2020 in Swedish.