Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences | Pool photo by Rich Hundley/The Trentonian Rutgers’ saliva-based Covid test could be key to unlocking New Jersey’s economy

New Jersey officials are hoping a saliva-based test developed by Rutgers University will soon allow tens of thousands of state residents a day to be tested for coronavirus.

The test, which was touted by President Donald Trump during a press briefing late last week, could allow New Jersey to roughly triple its current daily testing capacity, potentially putting the state on track to lift elements of a stay-at-home order officials believe has saved tens of thousands of lives at tremendous economic cost.


“Rapid return testing, contact tracing and then a plan for isolation and/or quarantine — those are the essential elements of the infrastructure that we’re going to need before you have the confidence — and we can tell you we’ve got the confidence — to begin to reopen our state,” Murphy said Thursday during his daily coronavirus press briefing in Trenton.

“We know this for a fact, including through the White House, that the Rutgers test protocol is being held up as a model not just in our state, but nationally,” he said.

The test, first made available to the general public at a drive-thru site in Middlesex County earlier this month, could soon have the capacity to deliver results for as many as 10,000 patients per day and within 24 or 48 hours after a sample is taken.

The Rutgers lab could hit that capacity within “a week or two,” Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor Brian Strom said during the briefing, adding that RUCDR Infinite Biologics, which developed the test, may soon be able to process as many as 140,000 samples per week.

At that rate, which would require additional more equipment and manpower, the Rutgers lab would roughly triple the state’s daily testing capacity, which Murphy pinned at 7,000 to 9,000 tests per day earlier this week.

Murphy has said that, at minimum, New Jersey would need to be able to test and process between 15,000 and 20,000 coronavirus tests each day before he could even consider lifting an executive order that shut down most retail businesses and required residents to remain at home whenever possible.

While swab-based coronavirus tests will still need to be utilized for health care providers and other frontline workers — those can deliver results in a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days — the saliva-based test “is at least as good as the traditional test and likely even better,” Strom said.

“We can expand it here,” in New Jersey, Strom said, adding that he hopes to export the technology to other states over time.

“It will be just as important to use elsewhere,“ he said, “but we want to reserve our capacity for New Jersey and to be able to help the state.”

Murphy administration officials plan to first use the tests at five developmental centers for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities which have approximately 1,250 residents and 4,300 staff. Strom said the test has already been used in a handful of municipalities across New Jersey and that Rutgers is working with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka to test as many as 100,000 residents in the state’s largest city.

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted RUCDR Infinite Biologics the first emergency use authorization for the saliva test. Yale University researchers found the saliva-based collection method may replace nasopharyngeal swabs — which deliver false negatives as often as 30 percent of the time and require more medical resources, including personal protective equipment — as the “gold standard” for rapid testing for coronavirus.

That research has not been peer reviewed and, though the Rutgers test shows promise, Murphy sounded a note of caution near the end of his briefing when he said the state has no plans to release a timeline for when it can reopen.

“It’s been cobbling together at every step of the way, from our FEMA partnerships to now Rutgers and everything in between,” Murphy said of the state’s current testing regime. “I only say that to distinguish between what has happened and what will happen. And we have not yet come to the conclusion of what our capabilities are and what the ‘will’ will look like.”

Almost 100,000 people have tested positive for coronavirus in New Jersey since March 4, and more than 5,300 people have died. While the state’s testing capacity has expanded since the early days of the pandemic, and now includes 86 sites across the state, Murphy characterized the testing situation as a “patchwork quilt” that’s been further rumpled by laboratory delays, limited stockpiles of swabs and personal protective equipment and long lines for possible coronavirus patients exhibiting symptoms.

“We’re not shutting down any avenues on testing, including continuing to pursue other sources of materials or other testing regimes," Murphy said Thursday. “It behooves us to pursue every avenue available.”

Even if the state does manage to scale its testing capacity in the coming days and weeks, it will also have to develop a small army of health professionals to do contact tracing for those who test positive as a measure to prevent future outbreaks.

“The more difficult thing is the contact tracing methodology,” state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said during Thursday’s briefing. “We met this morning on this, and we should have an outline, I hope, next week on how we expect to approach this and then fill in the blanks for how we get the contact tracers.

“I don’t think I’m revealing any information that’s secret,” she said. “We need 81 contact tracers for every 100,000 population. So you can figure that out if we do testing for everyone.”