I talked to India, must’ve been 15 times. Jackson says he was soon “on the phone 24/7. In August 2020, Shield T3 set up its first lab, hiring full-time employees. chemists, biologists, epidemiologists, physicists, and engineers were racing to build the Shield test-and-trace system, Jackson and university administrators took a 30,000-foot view, deciding that June to splinter off both the nonprofit and the for-profit efforts from the initial mission of ensuring campus safety. leaders were tapped to help the Illinois Department of Public Health ramp up statewide COVID testing even before the university’s saliva-based test existed. In early 2020, Jackson, who also runs the university’s tech incubator Discovery Partners Institute, and a small brigade of other U. Shield T3’s origin story is a tale of parallel sprints. Last year, that effort brought in $64 million in revenue for the university, says Bill Jackson, Shield T3’s principal officer and a former high-level executive at Johnson Controls, a multinational company that builds HVAC and fire safety equipment. In addition to setting up the nonprofit Shield Illinois to disseminate the test to schools and businesses statewide, the university founded a for-profit company, Shield T3, with headquarters in Chicago and Urbana, to market the test beyond Illinois. This time, though, the university wasn’t so quick to let a potentially groundbreaking product get away. Andreessen later made his way to California, where he built the massively successful Netscape Navigator. When it was released in 1993, Mosaic helped popularize online browsing. Bina at its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The Shield test may turn out to be the most significant innovation to emerge from the university since Mosaic, the web browser created by Marc L. Now research suggests this approach may be more effective in early detection, particularly with the omicron variant. scientists designed a saliva-based test because supply chain issues made the materials for nasal swab testing hard to obtain. As the pandemic has raged, so too has the need for rapid testing. That turned out to be just the tip of Shield’s market potential. They had the test ready in six weeks, in time for the return of the university’s 50,000 students in late summer. In the spring of 2020, they started developing a test-and-trace system called Shield that features a saliva-based PCR test and data infrastructure to track results and watch for outbreaks. It’s proving to be a fruitful business model, one that wouldn’t have been possible without the work of university researchers in Urbana-Champaign during the early days of the COVID crisis. The university has been selling the rapid test to companies, schools, and other organizations around the world. The testing medium? Not nasal swabs, but vials of spittle. University of Illinois mobile labs scattered across the country can process up to 10,000 COVID-19 tests a day, with a turnaround of often under 12 hours. It’s a wonder what can happen in a 53-by-8-foot trailer.
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