Open Development and Clinical Validation of Multiple 3D-Printed Nasopharyngeal Collection Swabs: Rapid Resolution of a Critical COVID-19 Testing Bottleneck

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Abstract

The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a severe international shortage of the nasopharyngeal swabs that are required for collection of optimal specimens, creating a critical bottleneck blocking clinical laboratories’ ability to perform high-sensitivity virological testing for SARS-CoV-2. To address this crisis, we designed and executed an innovative, cooperative, rapid-response translational-research program that brought together health care workers, manufacturers, and scientists to emergently develop and clinically validate new swabs for immediate mass production by 3D printing.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.14.20065094: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: We involved representatives of our institution’s nursing, legal, intellectual property, leadership, purchasing, human resources, communications, and contracting teams and the institutional review board early and often in order to facilitate open development, reassign idled staff to our process, and minimize lead times during the rapidly changing situation.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    We took high-resolution photographs of all prototypes and stored Phase I results in a Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA) spreadsheet that remains publicly available in the repository.
    Microsoft Excel
    suggested: (Microsoft Excel, RRID:SCR_016137)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.