Technology is always changing. To help us identify different viruses that are collected on swabs in the clinic we use PCR assay. This process takes 3-4 hours to run and collect information. A recent study has found an alternative method called loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP). During a comparative study it was found that this technique is just as sensitive and specific to identifying and quantifying viruses. The main difference is that this method only takes 1 hour from swab collection to results! 

Check out this cool paper!

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2018/lc/c8lc00841h