Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with their collaborators at the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Ragon Institute, have been working on a CRISPR-based diagnostic for COVID-19 that can produce results in 30 minutes to an hour, with similar accuracy as the standard PCR diagnostics now used.

For our comprehensive coverage and latest updates on COVID-19 click here.

The new test, known as STOPCovid, is still in the research stage but, in principle, could be made cheaply enough that people could test themselves every day. In a study appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers showed that on a set of patient samples, their test detected 93 percent of the positive cases as determined by PCR tests for COVID-19.

"We need rapid testing to become part of the fabric of this situation so that people can test themselves every day, which will slow down outbreak," says Omar Abudayyeh, an MIT McGovern Fellow working on the diagnostic.