It comes as no surprise that COVID-19 dominated the news for the first half of 2020, as evidenced in a list we compiled of the articles most viewed by LabPulse.com members.
The most-viewed article for the first half was a story we ran in May about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) publishing a list of commercial antibody tests for the novel coronavirus that should not be marketed due to failure to meet new regulatory requirements. While in the early days of the pandemic, the agency took a very lenient approach, allowing any developer to market an antibody test as long as it provided notification of intent to do so, the FDA later tightened its policies. Labs have been advised not to use tests that are on its removal list, which is continually updated, and to be sure to remove them from stock.
Quality of testing amid a shortage of diagnostics that has persisted since the start has been a dominant concern for lab professionals and the organizations that represent them. The top 10 stories for the first half of the year include an article about whether antibody tests would be able to live up to the hype surrounding them and a piece by sister company Kalorama Information about the potential for molecular point-of-care tests to come to the rescue during the outbreak.
In addition to regulatory updates and quality control analyses, pandemic coverage has included the evolving scientific understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the impact on testing volumes, and supply chain shortages. A popular story from late-March explored the phenomenon of patients continuing to shed the virus that causes COVID-19 even though they no longer had symptoms.
Although coronavirus understandably topped readers' concerns and interests, articles about digital pathology and artificial intelligence (AI) have been consistently popular. If you missed them the first time around, you may want to check out our stories reviewing the impact of AI on clinical diagnostics and Google's deep learning system for oncology applications.
Below is the complete top 10 list of articles on LabPulse.com for the first half of 2020, as measured by member traffic. We hope you enjoyed reading these stories as much as we enjoyed bringing them to you.
- FDA pulls plug on wayward coronavirus antibody tests (May 22)
- Do patients still have COVID-19 after symptoms resolve? (March 30)
- Molecular testing and COVID-19: Where are we now? (March 26)
- Can the reality of coronavirus antibody tests live up to hype? (April 6)
- AACC guidance urges caution on rapid POC coronavirus tests (June 5)
- Could mPOC come to the rescue in COVID-19 outbreak? (March 6)
- Machine learning could 'transform' cervical cancer screening, NCI researchers report (June 25)
- Google reports pathology AI helps predict survival in cancer patients (June 17)
- Clinical diagnostics and the artificial intelligence boom (March 23)
- Cepheid set to start shipping 45-minute coronavirus POC test (March 23)
