UTHSC News: Molecular/COVID Lab Closes After Four Years of Service in the Face of Unprecedented Pandemic

The world shut down in response to COVID-19 in early March 2020. By late March, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center announced it was partnering with University Clinical Health (UCH) to open a lab on the Memphis campus to analyze the deluge of COVID-19 tests being done around town.

By May 4, the Molecular/COVID Lab in the 930 Madison Building at UT Health Science Center had done both the regulatory and scientific technical work to become one of only a dozen academic medical centers in the country to receive an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA to produce its own assay for the virus to determine who was infected and who was not.

This was done in record time and in collaboration with partners inside and outside the university, all to help the community battle a pandemic that was still mainly a mystery.

After four years and more than 200,000 diagnostic tests analyzed since the beginning of the pandemic, the Molecular/COVID Lab closed Friday, May 3. The closing is the result of the decreasing volume of COVID-19 testing, changing requirements for asymptomatic screening, the ability of hospital labs to do their own testing and analysis, and the end of the public health emergency.

"So, it's a good thing that numbers went down. It's a good thing that we have this pandemic under control. But it's bittersweet, because it also meant the need for this rapidly established, exemplary laboratory went away as well," said Vickie Baselski, PhD, a tenured professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, who was a clinical, technical, and regulatory consultant for the lab since it opened.

"This is a story about how a group of people came together to meet an urgent need of the community during a never before experienced pandemic," Dr. Baselski said. "Previous pandemics have not carried the mortality, have not carried the fear factor. It hit hard and it hit fast and there was not laboratory support to meet the demands or the needs of the challenge of this pandemic."

Read more at our UTHSC news site.