Robots will help UTHSC lab crank out coronavirus test results, organizers say

Officials in Shelby County have reported long delays in processing of coronavirus lab tests. Among them is Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, who said this week she had waited 12 days for results from her own COVID-19 test.

But new labs may reduce the problem.

One of the new labs is at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. It isn't yet fully operational, but organizers say that once it's running, it will produce results within 24 hours of the test, or even sooner. 

Fast test results matter because they allow health officials to isolate infected people and notify their contacts quickly. 

Organizers of the new UTHSC lab are now saying they aim to process as many as 1,500 samples a day. A key to doing so much, so quickly, is the use of robots. "You can't do that many samples by hand," said UTHSC medical school Executive Dean Dr. Scott Strome.

The lab has several robot devices in use at the lab now, and is in the process of setting up to use a bigger one that can handle more samples, he said.

Dr. Mahul Amin, chairman of the university's department of pathology, is one of the key organizers of the new lab in a building on Madison Avenue in the medical district. He said the university is hiring new people for the project and reassigning existing UTHSC staffers.

"I would add that the team of 25, 30 people that are working on it have been working with one single-minded aim: that this is a societal crisis and a medical need that we need to fill," he said. 

They aim to ramp up to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Meanwhile, Memphis-based commercial lab company Poplar Healthcare announced this week that it's running coronavirus tests. “Our proximity to FedEx allows our laboratory to not only service the city of Memphis and surrounding communities, but anywhere FedEx flies," the company's medical director, Dr. Shawn Kinsey, said in a statement. The lab is advertising results within 24 to 48 hours of receipt of the sample.

Another Memphis-based commercial provider, AEL, or American Esoteric Laboratories, has likewise begun offering coronavirus tests.

Testing coronavirus is a two-stage process: samples are collected through nasal swabs at clinics, drive-thru sites, hospitals and other settings, then sent to a lab.

Strome said some labs are now overburdened. "As we all know, as folks reach capacity in their labs, the turnaround time really slows down," Strome said. "And with people starting to get ill, and as we start to more towards the peak of the curve, we have have the ability to test rapidly." 

In an interview earlier this week, the organizers said the new UTHSC processing lab was scheduled to have its first run on Wednesday, when staffers plan to test some 150 samples collected that day from the big drive-thru coronavirus testing center at Tiger Lane.

UTHSC and local governments operate the Tiger Lane drive-thru center. Once the new processing lab has shown that it can handle the Tiger Lane tests, UTHSC hopes to start running tests for area hospitals and other medical providers, too.

Setup of the lab is running a few days behind schedule; Strome had said earlier this month that he hoped the lab would be fully operational by Monday of this week and would process 1,000 samples per day.

He said clearing the regulatory hurdles has taken longer than expected, but the end goal has not changed. "We're not backing off that number. We anticipate we'll be at 1,000 to 1,500 samples per day." The only question is when, he said.

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Reports of testing delays have raised concerns

The area's first coronavirus case was reported on March 8. Since then, coronavirus testing in the Memphis area has increased dramatically. 

On Friday, the health department reported that 2,218 people had been tested in Shelby County. 

By Wednesday morning, that number had more than doubled to 5,506. 

But as the number of tests grow, so do delays - and any delay raises the possibility of a person spreading the virus to others.

At a news conference Wednesday, Alisa Haushalter, leader of the Shelby County Health Department, said the health department is sometimes seeing a delay of six to 10 days between the date of a test and the report to the department. Such delays make it harder for the department to start a contact tracing investigation.

Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer said in an interview with The Daily Memphian that she was tested for coronavirus at a Christ Community Health Services site on March 19. More than 12 days later, she said she had not received results.

"I didn’t want to share this but it’s my public duty," she wrote on Twitter. "I’m hopeful I’ll receive results soon & that I can move forward doing the work I’m called to do. That work includes helping find dollars to unclog our public health system to avoid future issues like this & get people tested."

Efforts to reach Sawyer for an update Wednesday were unsuccessful. 

Chris Stovall, a spokeswoman for Christ Community, said the organization sent its tests for processing at a big commercial lab company, LabCorp, and LabCorp was overwhelmed, she said. "They just could not keep up with the demand," she said.

Christ Community has now contracted with Poplar Healthcare and hopes for a faster turnaround.

Paying for the UTHSC lab

Strome said the new UTHSC coronavirus lab will have a huge price tag, but he declined to put a dollar figure on it in an interview.

Once the lab has contracts with area hospitals, he hopes Medicare, Medicaid and other insurance entities will pay for the tests and make the operation sustainable.

But making money isn't the point, organizers said. "The goal of this isn't a financial incentive in any way. We're trying to put this in place to help our communities."

Investigative reporter Daniel Connolly welcomes tips and comments from the public. Reach him at 529-5296, daniel.connolly@commercialappeal.com, or on Twitter at @danielconnolly.