Top Technical Advances of 2020

The pandemic spurred innovation in a variety of ways, from CRISPR-based diagnostics to cell biology benchwork at home.

| 3 min read
a mockup of an at-home COVID-19 test in development

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Much of the world became aware of the disease now known as COVID-19 in January, and impressively, a diagnostic PCR test became available the same month. We’ve since seen an explosion in potential variations on that assay, including saliva tests, which bypass the need for scarce swabs, and a slew of techniques that could be considerably faster and cheaper than PCR, including breath tests, at-home antigen tests, a diagnostic that combines loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and CRISPR, and even an AI model that detects telltale signs of COVID-19 from CT scans.

While diagnostics gave us hard numbers on SARS-CoV-2’s devastating sweep, the rapid development of vaccines against it allowed us to imagine the pandemic coming under control. mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were among the early leaders of the vaccine race, training the spotlight on a newer technique that had been attempted for other diseases but had not yet ...

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Meet the Author

  • Shawna Williams

    Shawna was an editor at The Scientist from 2017 through 2022. She holds a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Colorado College and a graduate certificate and science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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