On Jun. 24, 2020, the University of Oxford that the COVID-19 National DiagnOstic Research and Evaluation Platform (CONDOR) will create a single national route for evaluating new diagnostic tests in hospitals and in community healthcare settings. The £1.3 million research programme will bringing together experts who are highly experienced in evaluating diagnostic tests and generating the robust evidence required for a test to be used in the National Health Service.

‘Right now, there’s a critical gap in how we road-test new diagnostics for COVID-19. By robustly evaluating these diagnostics in health and care settings, the CONDOR programme will help the government and clinicians to understand the real-world accuracy of these tests in patients presenting with COVID-19 symptoms in the NHS.’

Jointly led by the University of Oxford and the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, the programme will put the many tests developed by the life sciences industry to either detect current coronavirus infection or to find out if someone has previously been infected through their paces in hospital, general practice, and care home environments.

The research will assess multiple diagnostic tests at once at sites across the country and can be adapted to add in new tests as they become available, and this study is one of a number of COVID-19 studies that have been given urgent public health research status by the Department of Health and Social Care, to expedite its delivery in the health and care system.

At present, the main test currently used to detect coronavirus infection (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction [RT-PCR]) often involves sending samples away to laboratories, which can take up to 72 hours to provide results.