July 27, 2023
Experience, resourcefulness and sheer luck enabled a crew of students and faculty from the College of Medicine to fill an urgent need for COVID testing in Philadelphia early in the pandemic. Now, they’re using their knowledge to build a commercial diagnostics service.
It was Aug. 15, 2020, five months into the lockdown, and Garth Ehrlich was desperate to get away.
“I hadn’t been out of my condo and couldn’t take it anymore,” recalls Ehrlich, who is a professor of microbiology and immunology, and otolaryngology, in Drexel’s College of Medicine. He loaded up his car and hit the road for his friends’ farm in the Midwest, where he planned to relax for his first vacation in six months.
“And then,” he recalls, “I got a call from the chair of my department.”
Read more at Exel Drexel University Research Magazine.