Rutgers creates COVID-19 center to fight pandemic.

Byline: David Hutter

Rutgers University has created a new center to coordinate the university's research and public health and outreach efforts to combat COVID-19.

Dr. William Gause works at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. He is part of a research team that is participating in a first external evaluation of COVID-19 tests. Gause spoke with NJBIZ.

"We are doing a number of different research projects," Gause said. "One is the rapid point of care diagnostic test. It has recently been launched that will allow detection of this virus. It is highly sensitive and it can be tested at local sites. It does not require someone to go to a hospital. The test takes 45 minutes so you can get the results very quickly with this test."

"We are interested in doing clinical trials, which will allow us to do tests in terms of sampling to see if there may be approaches other than nasal swabs, such as saliva or sputum, that may be able to detect the virus," Gause said. "We want to see if there are other kinds of sampling that we might be able to use to facilitate the whole testing process."

Gause also said they have other clinic trials going on.

"We are proposing to do a clinic trial onhealth care workers to determine the development of COVID in health care workers compared with non-health care workers."

Rutgers is doing other projects. One is studying the immune response that develops with the SARS-CV 2 virus.

"The new center allows us to focus on research involved with COVID-19," Gause said.

The center's goal is to serve as an institutional hub for Rutgers' COVID-19 research activities and information dissemination.

Gause will be the director of the Rutgers Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases (i3D).

"Given our expertise and the health needs at the state and national levels, we are excited to announce the establishment of the Center for COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness to address SARS CoV-2, the causative pathogen of COVID-19, and other emerging pathogen threats," Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers...