Meenta Announces Partnership with Mirimus for K-12 Pooled Saliva COVID-19 Testing

Meenta, a leading provider of COVID-19 testing software for K-12 schools, colleges and universities, is announcing a partnership with Mirimus to bring an unparalleled experience to COVID-19 testing to safely reopen schools. This announcement follows their recently co-sponsored Back to School Conference, where thought leaders in education, science, and policy met to discuss some of the very issues and solutions they are now providing to schools across the country.

Mirimus is a clinical laboratory based in Brooklyn, NY, that has developed a pioneering COVID-19 testing platform which enables saliva-based sampling, pooled testing, and individual diagnostics with just one sample from each individual. SalivaClear enables high-quality, simple, and cost-efficient detection of SARS-CoV2 to quickly isolate COVID-19 hotspots before they can become outbreaks. This approach is a highly accurate, RT-PCR-based testing strategy based on leading research from Yale University, and is operating under an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA. This is the same technology that enabled the NBA to hold their playoffs last season in a "bubble", and enabled Mirimus to win the $6M XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing Competition. According to Prem Premsrirut, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Mirimus, "We have now increased our volume to 100,000 tests per week and are working to scale to 1 million through our partner lab network over the next few months. SalivaClear is a highly effective, efficient and cost-effective solution to COVID-19 surveillance testing that has been successfully utilized by hundreds of schools, businesses and government organizations across the country to conduct surveillance testing of groups of individuals in order to quickly isolate COVID-19 hotspots before they can become outbreaks."

Using the SalivaClear technology, each tube has a unique barcode that is scanned before saliva samples are collected on site and sent directly to the lab, where samples are pooled in batches of 24 samples and tested. These results are sent back to the school within 24 hours of the lab receiving the sample, a notable improvement over most competitors. Positive pools are re-tested in sub-pools of 2 samples and then individually tested if they test positive again. Sub-pool and individual diagnostic tests are available within hours of the first result. Saliva samples are less invasive than swab-based testing, which could be important for young student populations. Just as importantly, this convenient and accurate test is also highly cost-effective.

Mirimus and Meenta have worked together with over 50 K-12 schools over the past six months, impacting tens of thousands of people to keep our education system operational. "This is why Meenta was built, to provide access to affordable clinical testing based on need, not geography. There is a lack of a tech stack in clinical diagnostics that makes it easy for schools to order tests from any lab," says Gabor Bethlendy, CEO of Meenta.

With no setup or ongoing maintenance fee, Mirimus' world-class COVID-19 testing solution is made convenient and accessible for schools using the Meenta Pooling app. Using a HIPAA-compliant, secure API integration, test results are near-instantly available to schools when the lab reports the result. Using dashboards in the app, schools can visualize testing pool result breakdowns and population statistics to turn data into actionable insights. Meenta Pooling also handles consent forms directly in the app with a few clicks, removing the headache of managing paper forms for an entire student population. "Think of Meenta Pooling as a huge team of support staff for your school administrators, working 24/7 to make sure that they have the data they need, exactly when they need it, with no mistakes," says Meenta CTO Stephan Smith.

Traditional pooled testing techniques pose a formidable financial and logistical challenge, especially when a pool tests positive. First, the Meenta Pooling app tracks personal health information for you, which is a huge improvement over the status quo used by many schools, which often involves pen and paper or spreadsheets. Instead, the Meenta Pooling app allows schools to manage barcode information, testing results and personal health information needed for regulatory reporting. Second, when a pool has a positive result, instead of lengthy quarantine times, samples are automatically re-tested to quickly allow schools to act on their results.

This K-12 COVID-19 testing program is available immediately on the Meenta Marketplace, a testing marketplace that provides schools access to millions of tests from different clinical labs and diagnostic companies. The Marketplace also allows schools to seamlessly supplement their testing protocol with other test types, including rapid antigen tests such as the BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card Home Test, among others. 

About Meenta

Meenta was born out of the idea that life science and diagnostics could greatly benefit from the technological revolution that has forever changed the way we shop, dine, vacation, and catch a ride. Grounded in technology and sitting at the intersection of supply and demand, the Meenta marketplace brings together the widest array of testing products and laboratory services combined with world-class scientific expertise and clinical oversight all in one place. Meenta exists to completely revolutionize the way the world accesses diagnostic testing and laboratory capabilities. Our vision is to make all of the world's scientific equipment and clinical tests accessible to everyone. Any test. Any time. One marketplace.

About Mirimus

Since its founding 10 years ago, Mirimus, Inc. has established itself as a leader in conducting high-volume, complex and highly effective PCR testing. This unique skill set led Mirimus to develop SalivaClear, a COVID-19 testing platform that combines saliva-based sampling, pooled testing and PCR diagnostics to improve the scalability, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and accuracy of COVID-19 testing.