A Million Tests. Seven Robots. One Determined Community.

After the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued stay-at-home orders in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing all nonessential University operations to go remote, we knew that to bring people back to campus we’d have to create our own system to prevent outbreaks in our close-knit, urban research University.

So President Robert A. Brown asked Gloria Waters, vice president and associate provost for research, to investigate what it would take for BU not only to perform thousands of tests a day but to deliver results within 24 hours.

Waters knew exactly who to turn to: Catherine Klapperich, director of BU’s Precision Diagnostics Center and vice chair and professor of biomedical engineering, and Douglas Densmore, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, who had experience using liquid-handling robots in his synthetic biology research. The pair determined the machinery needed and operational costs of processing more than 6,000 tests a day. The project would be expensive, but the necessary funds were allocated.

Catherine Klapperich and Douglas Densmore — Catherine Klapperich, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Douglas Densmore, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, helped lead the University’s effort to stand up its own COVID-19 testing facility.

“There was buy-in from BU leadership from the start,” Waters says. “President Brown is an engineer. He wanted BU to develop solutions.”

Led by Klapperich and Densmore, a group of engineering faculty, staff, and graduate students raced against the clock to assemble a one-of-a-kind COVID-19 testing facility inside the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering, featuring seven robots to automate testing. Those machines enabled the lab to process more than 1,100 tests in two hours as opposed to the 96 tests possible in four hours when processed by hand.

Meanwhile, Eric Kolaczyk, director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering and professor of mathematics and statistics, led an intensive modeling effort to make sure individuals were screened at frequent enough intervals to prevent infected people from going undetected. Nasal swab sampling sites were set up around BU and a digital appointment tool was developed to control the flow of traffic to sampling sites.

By August 2020, the first pilot tests had been performed, and by September, the BU Clinical Testing Laboratory was up and running, with more than 150 people working at five collection sites across our campuses and thousands of tests being performed daily. As the fall 2020 semester progressed, remarkably, there were no widespread clusters, no known transmissions in classrooms, and minimal virus spread throughout residence halls.

In the video above, meet the team who built Boston University's Clinical Testing Lab.

BU hired and trained contact tracers who worked tirelessly to identify and isolate close contacts of people at BU who had tested positive. And for those who had been exposed or infected, we set up designated quarantine housing and isolation housing.

By the end of FY2021, the University had conducted more than a million tests, recorded a campus positivity rate below 0.2%—well below the state average—and saw no major COVID-19 outbreaks on campus.

“This was the most challenging thing I’ve done in my career, even though, scientifically, these are all things scientists can do, things that I’ve done routinely,” says Klapperich. “However, we were doing this on a scale and within a time period that was unprecedented.”