New York City’s health department on Wednesday unveiled the “Quickie Lab” at its Chelsea Express Sexual Health Clinic, a new system for gonorrhea and chlamydia tests that reduces the wait time for results from seven days to three hours.

City health officials say the shorter wait time should help stem the spread of these common sexually transmitted infections, both of which are often asymptomatic. Rates of gonorrhea in particular are increasing in the U.S., almost entirely due to a sharp uptick in cases among gay men.

Demetre Daskalakis, deputy commissioner at the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the new system closes a loophole at their sexual health clinics.

“Gonorrhea and chlamydia testing — that’s on the slow boat, not that slow but still not that fast,” Daskalakis said. “You have to get the specimen, then it goes to lab, then the lab tests it, and the information goes back, and then the clinic releases the information, and then if you need treatment you have to come back in.” Currently that process takes about five days.

Now, with the help of a new integrated testing system called GeneXpert, made by Cepheid, the Quickie Lab at Chelsea Express will be able to do all of that lab work in the basement of the Chelsea Sexual Health Clinic. Officials say the system will be up and running soon, with extended testing hours around WorldPride NYC—Stonewall 50.

Daskalakis said he’d heard a community pitch about opening a rapid STI clinic, but the problem was the size of the GeneXpert.

“The machine weighs almost a ton each, so it looked pretty impossible,” Daskalakis explained. Eventually, they identified a location in the basement that didn’t require reinforced floors.

"It looks like a space ship landed in Chelsea."

David Persing, chief medical and technology officer at Cepheid, said all the lab work previously done to conduct nucleic acid amplification tests, which can detect minuscule amounts of gonorrhea and chlamydia DNA, takes place in a cartridge that goes into the GeneXpert machine.

Dr. Jennifer Rakeman-Cagno, Asst. Commissioner of the NYCDOHMH's Public Health Laboratory, holding a GeneXpert cartridge on Wednesday. NYCDOHMH

“We essentially automated this process so that a plastic cartridge can carry out all the steps necessary to perform nucleic acid amplification tests,” Persing said. “So all you have to do now is add the sample to the cartridge and all the rest of the steps are automated.”

This new technology, which the health department hopes to bring to its seven other sexual health clinics across the city, comes as the decades-long success against the spread of gonorrhea has begun to falter. Historically, U.S. rates of gonorrhea have had two peaks: during World War II, just before penicillin was commercialized, and during the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and '70s.