The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed national shortcomings in the ability to test for viruses and deliver results quickly on a large scale, and the U.S. military has taken notice.
Given the enduring need of this type of testing considering widespread health crises will no doubt happen again in the future, University of Arizona faculty have been awarded a $9.5 million contract from the Department of Defense to develop new testing devices that can detect pathogens in just minutes.
The contact comes from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a part of the DOD, which stipulates the production of nearly 3,000 testing devices over the next three years.
The research team also includes staff from Arizona State University, Duke University, the University of Nevada, Reno and Whitespace Enterprises, a private diagnostics development lab founded by UArizona professor Frederic Zenhausern.
