The Food and Drug Administration approved an “emergency use authorization” for a new Coronavirus test that will speed up results tenfold, helping to solve a difficult aspect of the efforts to contain the spread of the virus in the U.S.
Swiss drugmaker Roche’s cobas 8800 system is able to process 4,128 tests a day, and their 6800 system is able to process 1,440 per day. The new system will complete a test in about 4 hours.
“We are increasing the speed definitely by a factor of 10,” Thomas Schinecker, head of the Swiss drugmaker’s diagnostics unit, said in an interview.
This is the third test granted emergency approval. There are 110 of these Roche tools in the U.S., and they have added a “significant amount” of new ones in key locations in the U.S. in recent weeks. Roche is producing these at the limits of their capacity, according to a company spokesman.
The tests analyze nucleic acids extracted from patients’ saliva or mucus, and compare them against sequences found in coronavirus strains, including SARS and the one that emerged in Wuhan, China.
See Bloomberg News.