On Sept. 17, 2020, researchers announced a CRISPR-based test developed at MIT and the Broad Institute that can detect nearly as many cases as the standard COVID-19 diagnostic.

The new test, known as STOPCovid, iin the research stage but, in principle, could be made cheaply enough that people could test themselves every day. In a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers showed that on a set of patient samples, their test detected 93 percent of the positive cases as determined by PCR tests for COVID-19.