Biohackers at BioFoundry in Australia are making their own experimental COVID-19 test kits, which purport to diagnose the disease in just 30 minutes, and which patients can potentially perform themselves.
The open-source (OS) community proposes ditching the expensive capital equipment in favor of a reaction that requires only a set of biological and chemical reagents in a single tube that gives a reliable diagnosis. We are currently sourcing the reagents to replicate the experiments being shared within the community. BioFoundry proposes setting up the facilities to synthesize the required biological reagents at scale, while collaborating with our sister company Argent Scientific to source the required chemicals. We would then focus on producing self-diagnosis kits to fill the diagnostic gap in Australia, before moving our focus to Africa and South-East Asia to help support their containment efforts as well.
