Robotics platform could revolutionize how labs track the spread of COVID-19, other pathogens A robotics platform designed by Toronto researchers to screen thousands of COVID-19 samples at once has the potential to revolutionize how labs track the spread of viruses and other pathogens, according to new findings. The study, out Wednesday in Nature Communications, found that the next-generation, ultra-high-throughput sequencing platform, called C19-SPAR-Seq, designed by researchers from the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) at Sinai Health, has a sensitivity rate greater than 95 per cent in positive cases during peak onset. Identifying positive samples quickly and accurately is critical in beating this pandemic.With new and potentially dangerous variants now circulating, this is a platform that is scalable, automated and capable of analyzing thousands of COVID-19 patient samples in a single instrument run."