The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected our health, but also our lifestyles and our economies. Given its high
non-symptomatic transmissibility, to stop a pandemic-causing pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 early on its tracks without
needing to resort to economy-damaging measures, would have required a mass testing strategy very early on: according
to some estimates up to 10% of a nation’s population should have been tested on a daily basis to achieve this. Given the
exponential growth tendency of pandemic-causing respiratory viruses, as soon as such pathogen is identified a largescale
testing campaign should immediate be deployed (a strategy adopted successfully in very densely populated areas
of China). And given the long periods required to develop other pandemic-fighting strategies (i.e. such as vaccines
and quick diagnostic tests), PCR-based mass testing could be the ideal front line of defense, since it can be developed
in only a few weeks after decoding the genetic map of the pathogen. But although PCR testing capacity has greatly
been increased worldwide, regularly testing large fractions of the population would still remain prohibitively costly with
current technology.
The PCR-4-ALL consortium (combining expertise in diagnostics, high-throughput-screening, virology, disease
modelling, econometrics and digital health platforms) will aim to demonstrate the technical feasibility of carrying out
population-wide PCR testing by demonstrating a capacity of >10^5 tests in a single day and platform, in an extremely
cost-effective manner (at least 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than currently). We will, furthermore, evaluate the
effectiveness of utilizing this strategy as the main pandemic-fighting measure by assessing its ability to minimize, or
even prevent, the need to implement other costly and partially ineffective measures (i.e. lockdowns and vaccination
campaigns).