On Sept. 18, 2020, Uconn researchers, in a paper published in Nature Communications, validated the clinical feasibility of the platform using COVID-19 clinical swab samples. Additionally, the researchers used a low-cost hand warmer as an incubator to detect clinical sample results within 20 minutes. In March, the researchers began to develop a new, low-cost, CRISPR-based diagnostic platform to detect infectious diseases, including HIV virus, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).