On Sept. 2, 2020, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced it had partnered with 108 public and private colleges and universities in Massachusetts and the surrounding region to provide regular COVID-19 testing for students, faculty, and staff, as part of back-to-school plans.

In March, Broad Institute’s Genomics Platform converted its existing, highly-automated CLIA-certified laboratory into a high-throughput COVID-19 test processing center. Since then, the Genomics Platform team has processed more than 1.1 million COVID-19 tests, returning results in about 24 hours on average. Among more than 415,000 tests conducted for the college and university testing program so far, the positive rate across the program (spanning students, faculty, and staff) is approximately 0.1 percent — or 1 in 1,000.

The program to support higher education was conceived in May, when the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts (AICUM) reached out to the Broad Institute to ask it to support its member organizations’ desire for regular testing in the Fall 2020 semester. Samples are collected by the institutions. Broad collects the samples from the schools and processes the tests for colleges and universities at a cost of $25 per test, compared to $100 to $150 per test charged by some private labs. (The standard cost for test processing at Broad is between $35-$50, but Broad has set a price of $25 per test for certain cases that are for critical public needs or that have high and sustained volume).

In March, Broad Institute’s Genomics Platform converted its existing, highly-automated CLIA-certified laboratory into a high-throughput COVID-19 test processing center. Since then, the Genomics Platform team has processed more than 1.1 million COVID-19 tests, returning results in about 24 hours on average.

With the recent increases, the Broad’s testing lab is now processing approximately 1 in every 20 tests conducted in the United States, based on testing data from the COVID Tracking Project. The Broad’s daily testing volume is reported on its COVID-19 testing dashboard.