* Government sets specific new challenge to industry to help achieve 100,000 tests a day by end of April
* Business consortium set up to rapidly develop new antibody tests
The
A number of existing suppliers and
Pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca and
Their work primarily focuses on tests to identify whether people currently have the virus, and will be targeted on frontline healthcare and other essential workers who have the virus before deploying the tests to the wider population.
New developments from businesses working to scale-up testing programmes include:
* a new testing laboratory to be set up by AstraZeneca,
* AstraZeneca and GSK are also providing scientific and technical expertise in automation and robotics to support the government's new national testing centres
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Health Minister
We are rapidly scaling up the national effort to boost testing capacity for coronavirus to protect the vulnerable, support our
I am proud that we have already had an impressive response from companies of different scales and from different sectors coming forward with a commitment to work together, share expertise and resources to establish a large British diagnostics industry which can help us achieve 100,000 tests a day by the end of April.
We will do everything we can to tackle this virus and we are pooling all the resources from our world-leading life sciences industry, top universities and clinical leaders to overcome this together.
As part of the government's national testing strategy, the expertise and resources of the
To support this, an online portal has launched on GOV.UK providing companies with specifications for our most urgent requirements, and the
Companies with proposals able to deliver on these specifications quickly and at scale may also be able to access a range of support from government, including accelerated regulatory approval, centralised procurement support if appropriate and, in some cases, development grants.
The government has set up a testing taskforce with over 100 companies and Health Secretary
1 To provide additional testing consumables that are in short supply, such as swabs, tubes and components for test kits
2 For universities, research institutes and private companies to donate additional lab testing capacity for coronavirus tests, supported by best practice guidance on specific requirements
3 To develop new technology to diagnose coronavirus quicker than ever before and new methods of delivering tests widely across the
4 Put forward proposals in support of reliable and accurate antibody testing. These should be scalable, resilient and scientifically robust. Proposals could include a range of ideas for end-to-end solutions or address specific challenges in the supply chain
One such group has already launched to meet the fourth of these challenges. A business consortium,
So far, the antibody tests that have gone through the validation process have not proven accurate enough to be rolled out for public use, which is why the government is also backing efforts to develop a home-grown test.
Only tests that are accurate will be rolled out, to ensure people are not put at risk and we will continue to work closely with
Professor
I'm delighted to be overseeing this absolutely crucial project to help us achieve 100,000 tests a day by the end of April.
We have already launched from scratch an entire new network of testing labs across the
The government's national testing strategy is split into 5 pillars:
The first pillar is testing for those with a medical need in
* We announced on 18 March that we would aim to increase
* We have already doubled testing to 10,000 tests a day in a fortnight, and we are now working towards 25,000 a day by late April.
In the second pillar of the plan, we have launched a partnership with universities, research institutes and companies to begin rollout of a network of new labs and testing sites across the
This involves setting up - from scratch and at pace - a completely new network of testing sites to collect samples and 3 new super labs (
Since the pilot facilities went live on 28 March, more than 20,000
The third pillar in the government's testing plan is antibody testing: these tests are designed to detect if people have had the virus and are now immune.
Antibody tests offer the hope that people who think they have had the disease will know they are immune. So far, the antibody tests that have gone through the validation process have not proven accurate enough to be rolled out for public use, which is why the government is backing efforts to develop a homegrown test.
The fourth pillar is surveillance. We aim to conduct some of the biggest surveys in the world to find out what proportion of the population have already had the virus. This is done using a high-accuracy antibody test operated by PHE at their Porton Down science campus. We will use these tests to help strengthen our scientific understanding and inform us all on the big choices we have to make about social distancing measures and how we exit from this crisis.
The fifth pillar is the most ambitious. We want to build, in a short space of time, the large-scale diagnostics industry that this country currently lacks. Just as our top-end manufacturers have joined the national effort to build ventilators, so our life sciences companies will do the same for testing.
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(C) 2020 M2 COMMUNICATIONS, source