DARPA DIGIT employs gene editing to diagnose COVID-19 and other pandemics and also determine the strain, their origin

Major infectious diseases, like COVID-19, often go undetected until they spread. Spotting the problem in a community isn’t easy, in part because infectious disease detection, which is the foundation for surveillance and contact tracing, can take hours, if not days. Compounding the problem is that traditional detection assays are designed a priori while newer bio-detection…