Quality & Governance News

NIH Grant Supports AI Solutions for COVID-19 Testing, Surveillance

NIH has awarded a grant of over $107 million to support new approaches to COVID-19 testing and surveillance, including artificial intelligence solutions.

NIH grant supports AI solutions for COVID-19 testing, surveillance

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By Jessica Kent

- NIH has issued a grant of over $107 million to fund innovative COVID-19 testing and surveillance methods nationwide, ranging from artificial intelligence solutions to home-based testing technologies.

The awards from the RADx Radical (RADx-rad) program – part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative – will also aim to develop platforms that can be deployed in future outbreaks of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

The program will support 49 research projects and grant supplements at 43 institutions across the US, and will focus on non-traditional viral screening approaches. These approaches include biological or physiological markers, new analytical platforms with novel chemistries or engineering, rapid detection strategies, point-of-care devices, and home-based testing technologies.

“To solve a problem as complicated as COVID-19, we need ideas, tools, and technologies that challenge the way we think about pandemic control,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD.

“These awards from the RADx-rad program provide superb examples of outside-the-box concepts that will help us overcome this pandemic and give us a cadre of devices and tactics to confront future outbreaks.”

The grants will support new approaches to identifying and tracking the virus that causes COVID-19. These projects include studying the implementation of devices with integrated artificial intelligence for the detection, diagnosis, prediction, prognosis, and monitoring of COVID-19 in clinical, community, and everyday settings.

Efforts will also focus on developing biomarkers and biosignatures for an algorithm using artificial intelligence to predict the long-term risk of disease severity after a child is exposed to COVID-19.

Additionally, the grant will support projects that develop novel, safe, and effective biosensing and detection technologies to spot signatures of COVID-19 from human skin or mouth, as well as wastewater technologies and data collection methods for detecting and estimating COVID-19 community infection levels. This can offer advanced knowledge of community spread and allow for targeted health protection measures.

The program will also aim to promote the development of a platform that integrates biosensing with touchscreen or other digital devices to achieve early, automatic detection and tracing of COVID-19 in real time.

NIH is also supporting two intramural projects through this initiative: a $1 million award to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for developing barcoded screening of SARS-CoV-2; and a $200,000 award to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for a nationwide Early-Warning System and Data platform to guide policy decisions for public health management of viral diseases, with COVID-19 as a use case.

The RADx-rad grants will build on efforts from NIH’s RADx initiative, a program that aims to speed innovation in the development, commercialization, and implementation of technologies for COVID-19 testing. The RADx initiative is a national call for scientists and organizations to bring their innovative ideas for new COVID-19 testing approaches and strategies.

“Now is the time for that unmatched American ingenuity to bring the best and most innovative technologies forward to make testing for COVID-19 widely available,” said Collins.

NIH has previously awarded grants for big data and analytics projects related to COVID-19. In September 2020, the organization offered contracts to seven companies and academic institutions to develop COVID-19-related digital technologies using big data.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) chose the seven projects from nearly 200 different ideas, representing a broad range of solutions for immediate public health needs related to the pandemic.

“The tools these organizations plan to develop could allow us to use containment efforts, like COVID-19 testing, social distancing, and quarantine, precisely when and where they’re needed. That might let more people return to less restricted living and reduce the risk of devastating local outbreaks,” said NCI Director Norman E. Sharpless, MD.

“We are working as quickly as possible to help businesses and universities develop innovative tools to achieve this goal.”