Alabama company has COVID-19 test that skips painful nasal swab

A Huntsville genetics lab says it has a new way to do regular COVID-19 testing without painful swabs.

Kailos Genetics is launching “Assure Sentinel” as “a first of its kind workplace viral suppression program.” It already has agreements to use the product at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, where it is a resident company, and Huntingdon College in Montgomery.

The company gets its samples through saliva collection, not nasal swabs. The new method is “easy and painless,” Kailos said in a news release. The samples are pooled for analysis. “Pooling dozens of samples together has been standard in blood banking for decades,” Kailos CEO Brian Pollock said in a statement. “The Assure Sentinel program is helping to suppress COVID-19 and returning people to the workplace.”