The unlikely pairing of the NBA and a team of scientists led by a Kiwi has resulted in a new test for COVID-19 being described by its inventors as a "game-changer".

The SalivaDirect test is cheap, fast, non-invasive and allows multiple people to be tested at once. And the brains behind it don't want a cent.

"This, I hope, is a turning point," New Zealander Anne Wyllie, one of the lead researchers on the SalivaDirect project at the Yale School of Public Health in the US, told ABC News.

"Expand testing capacity, inspire creativity and we can take competition to those labs charging a lot, and bring prices down. And that we can show people what can be done."

Instead of shoving a long stick up people's noses, the SalivaDirect test looks for the virus in their spit. 

"With saliva being quick and easy to collect, we realised it could be a game-changer in COVID-19 diagnostics," Dr Wyllie said in a statement released by Yale.

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Saliva samples from several different people can be mixed together and tested in one go - if the virus isn't found, all of them can breathe a sigh of relief. Individual tests only need to be done if the combined sample tests are positive.

The team's research, which involved the cooperation of basketballers in the NBA 'bubble', found the virus could be detected in infected samples without the need for expensive equipment. The NBA, which put its teams into an isolated bubble in Orlando, Florida in July so its season could continue, also funded the research.

The new test only costs "a couple of dollars" for the materials and chemicals - known as reagents - needed, Dr Wyllie said, compared to the estimated $150 cost of the swab test. The key difference is that it doesn't require extraction of the virus' RNA, a costly and expensive process. 

The NBA tests showed it has a similar accuracy to swabbing. 

The US Food and Drug Administration approved the test on Friday in an "emergency authorisation", despite the Yale team's research not yet being peer-reviewed, ESPN reported. The US has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world, and test results can take days to come back due to bottlenecks in the labs.

"We must continue to invent and implement new ways to conduct SARS-CoV-2 testing faster, more economically and with greater accessibility, while maintaining acceptable test accuracy," said lab director Charles Lee, using the virus' scientific name. "This method is an important next step toward this goal."

Dr Wyllie's team plans to allow others to use their testing system free of charge.

"SalivaDirect is not a kit that you can buy, it is a protocol that we can allow authorised labs to use with reagents that can be purchased for very cheap," Yale said. 

"Because SARS-CoV-2 rapidly spread worldwide, it has put immense strain on the supply chains that provide materials for tests, including swabs and test reagents. SalivaDirect is our answer to these problems."