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XUCLA's $10 Test Is Helping SoCal Schools Monitor Viruses as They Reopen
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Several Southern California schools and universities will be testing every student and employee returning to the classroom for COVID-19 and other viruses in an attempt to thwart an outbreak.
The effort is being led by SwabSeq, the UCLA-based sequencing platform that released an FDA-approved COVID-19 test last fall. Its goal is to avoid the mad scramble schools and public health officials went through at the beginning of the pandemic trying to find and isolate cases with very little infrastructure.
The plans come as the Biden administration pumps $10 billion into testing in preparation for a mass reopening of schools.
It's a stark shift in the way school officials handle viral illness — simply sending people home for a few days until they get better. But experts say as the country tries to rein in the coronavirus health officials will need to quickly distinguish between the deadly disease and other viral infections.
"We think that'll be really useful moving forward because we'll want to know, with flu season, what are people infected with? Is it the flu or is it COVID?" said Dr. Eleazar Eskin, the UCLA chair of the Department of Computational Medicine and one of the scientists behind SwabSeq.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to soon release updated guidance on testing to identify and track asymptomatic transmission of COVID.
SwabSeq's technology, which can process samples and return results within 24 hours, can be repurposed for viruses beyond the novel coronavirus, and by fall will be able to test teachers and students for all kinds of respiratory viruses, like the common flu.
Other COVID test manufactures are expected to come online soon as the Food and Drug Administration makes it easier for developers to seek emergency authorization on over-the-counter and at home COVID tests.
But Eskin said what distinguishes SwabSeq is its ability to test multiple respiratory viruses at a cost of $10 per test.
The platform has partnered with the University of California, Santa Barbara, Pepperdine and Caltech, along with some schools, to test people on a weekly or biweekly basis. It has begun sending tubes and funnels for saliva tests to the schools.
Already, it has processed nearly 100,000 coronavirus tests and is working with the California Department of Public Health to sequence positive samples for variants. Most of those are on UCLA's own campus.
"We're just thinking of, 'what do we wish we had in place in March of 2020 that could've made the outcome different with COVID-19?'" Eskin said. "And we want this project to basically put that technology infrastructure in place so that that doesn't happen again."
SwabSeq is leveraging two decades of genomic sequencing technology to test for coronavirus variants and other respiratory viruses, like the ever-changing flu that prompts a yearly vaccine. Researchers will sequence these genomes to map out what strains are whipping through the community by fall.
Mapping the genome sequence of virus variants early is the first step towards understanding how deadly or transmissive certain variants are, and seeing how effective vaccines will be in containing them.
"What those sequences do is they allow us to monitor those changes and see: how has it affected the behavior of the virus? Does it make it easier to spread? Does it make it more deadly?" said Dr. Timothy Brewer, an epidemiology professor at UCLA. "And where we really care about the changes is, do they affect the response of the immune system or the efficacy of the vaccine?"
Indeed, the World Health Organization said there were 13 different strains of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China even before cases popped up across the globe. And new strains that have emerged from Brazil and the U.K. have the ability to spread faster and evade vaccines.
The flu season at its peak killed 80,000 Americans in 2018, but was especially mild last year thanks to masks, hand washing and social distancing.
SwabSeq offers a COVID-19 test billed as the sweet spot between rapid antigen tests (which have high inaccuracy rates), and the more reliable polymerase chain reaction tests, which often take longer. Antigen tests look for proteins while the PCR tests for molecules but often need to extract RNA.
SwabSeq analyzes saliva samples without having to extract RNA, which allows the company to give accurate results quicker in a matter of 24 hours.
The test costs $20 right now, but Eskin says, with scale, SwabSeq could get it down to $10, making it useful and accessible for schools, especially as children are hotbeds for viruses and other bugs that spread around the classroom. Its COVID-19 test has already been administered to nearly 100,000.
"What we want to eventually do is set it up so the SwabSeq lab will be able to identify all the samples we get, we'll figure out what virus they're infected with and then also sequence the virus," Eskin said. "Kind of what we wish we had in place a year ago, because then we would have had a much clearer idea of what we're dealing with."
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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Mother Blames TikTok For Daughter’s Death in ‘Blackout Challenge’ Suit
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
The mother of a 10-year-old girl who died after allegedly trying a dangerous online “challenge” has sued Culver City-based TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, claiming the social media app’s algorithm showed her videos of people choking themselves until they pass out.
Nylah Anderson, an intelligent child who already spoke three languages, was “excruciatingly asphyxiated” and found unconscious in her bedroom on Dec. 7, according to a complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Pennsylvania. She spent five days in pediatric intensive care until succumbing to her injuries.
The lawsuit, filed by her mother Tawainna Anderson, claims TikTok’s algorithm had previously shown Nylah videos depicting the “Blackout Challenge,” in which people hold their breath or choke themselves with household items to achieve a euphoric feeling. That encouraged her to try it herself, the lawsuit alleged.
“The TikTok Defendants’ algorithm determined that the deadly Blackout Challenge was well-tailored and likely to be of interest to 10-year-old Nylah Anderson, and she died as a result,” the suit said.
In a previous statement about Nylah’s death, a TikTok spokesperson noted the “disturbing” challenge predates TikTok, pointing to a 2008 warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about deadly choking games. The spokesperson claimed the challenge “has never been a TikTok trend.” The app currently doesn’t produce any search results for “Blackout Challenge” or a related hashtag.
“We remain vigilant in our commitment to user safety and would immediately remove related content if found,” the TikTok statement said. “Our deepest sympathies go out to the family for their tragic loss.”
At least four other children or teens have died after allegedly attempting the Blackout Challenge, according to the Anderson lawsuit. TikTok has grappled with dangerous challenges on its platform before, including one in which people tried to climb a stack of milk crates. That was considered so dangerous that TikTok banned the hashtag associated with it last year. In February, TikTok updated its content rules to combat the dangerous acts and other harmful content.
The Anderson lawsuit comes as lawmakers and state attorneys general scrutinize how TikTok and other social media can be bad for teens and younger users, including by damaging their mental health, causing negative feelings about their body image and making them addicted to the apps.
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Netflix's New Culture Memo Addresses Censorship and Corporate Secrecy
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Netflix promised change after its poor first-quarter earnings. One of the first targets: the Netflix Culture document.
The changes, which Variety reported on Thursday, indicate a new focus on fiscal responsibility and concern about censorship. While promises to support honest feedback and open decision-making remain, the memo’s first update in almost five years reveals that the days of lax spending are over. The newly added “artistic expression” section emphasizes Netflix’s refusal to censor its work and implores employees to support the platform’s content.
The “artistic expression” section states that the company will not “censor specific artists or voices” and specifies that employees may have to work on content “they perceive to be harmful.” The memo points to ratings, content warnings and parental controls as ways for users to determine what is appropriate content.
Censorship has been a contentious issue within Netflix. Last year, employees walked out in protest after the company stood by comedian Dave Chappelle’s special, “The Closer,” which many said was transphobic. The streaming service has since announced four more specials from the comedian, who was attacked on stage at Netflix’s first comedy festival. The show will not air on the platform, as Netflix did not tape the event.
The reaction to Chappelle’s 2021 special ripples further in the updated memo. After firing an employee who leaked how much the company paid for the special, the new “ethical expectations” section directs employees to protect company information.
The memo also reflects pressure borught by poor first-quarter earnings. Employees are now instructed to “spend our members’ money wisely,” and Variety reported that earlier passages that indicated a lack of spending limits were cut. Variety also found that the updated memo removed promises that the company would not make employees take pay cuts in the face of Netflix’s own financial struggles.
These updates come as employee morale has reportedly dropped and editorial staffers at the Netflix website TuDum were laid off en masse. Those employees were offered two weeks of severance pay—and Netflix has now cut a section in the memo promising four months of full pay as severance.
As the company that literally wrote the book on corporate culture faces internal struggles, it's unlikely that making employees take on more responsibility while prioritizing corporate secrecy and discouraging content criticism will improve morale.
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
‘Raises’: Mahmee Secures $9.2M, Wave Financial Launches $60M Fund
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Venture Capital
Mahmee, an integrated care delivery platform for maternal and infant health that connects patients, health professionals, and healthcare organizations to increase access to prenatal and postpartum care, raised a $9.2 million Series A funding round led by Goldman Sachs.
FutureProof Technologies, a climate risk analytics platform, raised $6.5 million in capital led by AXIS Digital Ventures along with Innovation Endeavors and MS&AD Ventures.
Anja Health, a doctor-backed cord blood banking company, raised $4.5 million led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six.
Funds
Wave Financial LLC, a digital asset investment management company, is launching a $60 million fund to deploy capital via cryptocurrency.
Raises is dot.LA’s weekly feature highlighting venture capital funding news across Southern California’s tech and startup ecosystem. Please send fundraising news to Decerry Donato (decerrydonato@dot.la).
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.