ABSTRACT At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US faced nationwide shortages of nasopharyngeal swabs due to both overwhelmed supply chains and an increase in demand. To address this shortfall, multiple 3D printed swabs were ultimately produced and sold for COVID-19 testing. In this work, we present a framework for mechanical and functional bench-testing of nasopharyngeal swabs using standard and widely available material testing equipment. Using this framework, we offer a comprehensive, quantitative comparison of the 3D printed swabs to benchmark their performance against traditional flocked swabs. The test protocols were designed to emulate the clinical use of the nasopharyngeal swabs and to evaluate potential failure modes. Overall, the 3D printed swabs performed comparably to, or outperformed, the traditional swabs in all mechanical tests. While traditional swabs outperformed some of the new 3D printed swabs in terms of sample uptake and retention, similar amounts of RNA were recovered from both 3D printed and traditional swabs. GRAPHIC ABSTRACT

中文翻译：

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用于 COVID-19 测试的 3D 打印鼻咽拭子的性能。

摘要在 COVID-19 大流行开始时，由于供应链不堪重负和需求增加，美国面临全国鼻咽拭子短缺的问题。为了解决这一不足，最终生产并销售了多个 3D 打印拭子用于 COVID-19 测试。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个使用标准和广泛可用的材料测试设备对鼻咽拭子进行机械和功能台架测试的框架。使用这个框架，我们提供了 3D 打印拭子的全面、定量比较，以将它们的性能与传统植绒拭子进行比较。测试方案旨在模拟鼻咽拭子的临床使用并评估潜在的失败模式。总体而言，3D 打印棉签在所有机械测试中的表现与传统棉签相当或优于传统棉签。虽然传统拭子在样本吸收和保留方面优于一些新的 3D 打印拭子，但从 3D 打印和传统拭子中回收的 RNA 量相似。图形摘要