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Medicine Businesses

Ten-Minute Coronavirus Test For $1 Could Be Game Changer (bloomberg.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the fingers-crossed dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Already exhausted from testing for monkeypox and Lassa fever, Nigerian molecular bio-engineer Nnaemeka Ndodo had to work well past midnight earlier this month to find out if six Chinese construction workers were infected with the coronavirus. Ndodo had to collect samples from a hospital an hour away in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, then wait for six hours to get the results in what's one of only five laboratories able to test for the virus in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, with about 200 million people. In about three months' time, U.K.-based Mologic Ltd., in collaboration with Senegalese research foundation Institut Pasteur de Dakar, could shorten that wait to 10 minutes with a test that will help a continent with the world's most fragile healthcare system cope with the pandemic.

Using technology from home pregnancy and malaria tests, its saliva and finger-prick kit could be ready for sale by June for less than $1 apiece. In Africa, they will be manufactured in Senegal by diaTropix, a newly built diagnostics manufacturing facility run by the director of the Pasteur Institute, Amadou Alpha Sall, who has led training around the continent for coronavirus testing. The current Covid-19 tests, known as PCR tests, detect the genetic material of the pathogen in a laboratory process that can take several hours and cost over $400 in some private facilities. Mologic and the Institut Pasteur have joint capacity to produce 8 million tests a year and plan to sell them directly to African governments as well as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and the WHO, Fitchett said. Mologic is seeking to acquire a manufacturing facility to produce an additional 20 million tests annually, initially in the U.K. and later in Africa.
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Ten-Minute Coronavirus Test For $1 Could Be Game Changer More

Ten-Minute Coronavirus Test For $1 Could Be Game Changer

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  • Hi, I have a proposal for you (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday March 16, 2020 @05:25PM (#59837888)

    I'm a Nigerian Prince, ahem, I mean, Virologist ....

  • Details (Score:3)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @05:28PM (#59837906)

    What's the sensitivity; what's the specificity? Without those details this is a non-story.

    • And how much good is 8 million per year going to be?

      You'll need at least three per patient, plus more for the doctors, I assume. Sounds like we're talking a fraction of a percent of the needed number of test kits....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Depends. Low cost tests for various bacteria and viruses are already available for a few bucks per test (doctors buy them in huge quantities) but the results are only 95% so if the doctor suspects you have an issue, they still send for lab results.

      China has very low cost tests as well for coronavirus. Of 1014 patients, 59% (601/1014) had positive RT-PCR results, and 88% (888/1014) had positive chest CT scans. Not enough to stop the spread but good enough to pacify a population on edge of throwing over your

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      It's a non story anyway. This is an attempt to catch the eye of some venture capital. Good luck with that during a market crash.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      What's the sensitivity; what's the specificity? Without those details this is a non-story.

      Standard terminology in medical testing. Sensitivity true positive rates, specificity true negative rates. CS folks (and engineers) usually think in failures, so false positives and false negatives.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Sensitivity true positive rates, specificity true negative rates.

        Exactly. So what are the values of these two for this test? No numbers, no story.

  • Trading one form of time for another (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cytotoxic ( 245301 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @05:57PM (#59838034)

    This sounds like a simple antibody test - which is great for telling if you have been exposed and infected. But not so great at early detection. Your body has to mount an immune response first. So early on during the infection you'll show up negative. Kinda like that pregnancy test in the first 2 weeks.

    The PCR test is extremely sensitive to current infections. It will amplify any genetic material from the target, telling you if there are circulating virus particles with extreme specificity and accuracy.

    So if you have a bunch of Chinese workers and you want to screen them so they don't infect your crew, this 10 minute test won't help for the first couple of days that they might be viremic.

    PCR will catch it as soon as the bugs are replicating in your body.

    In that case, the 10 minutes isn't the major factor, it is the time from infection.

    • This sounds like a simple antibody test - which is great for telling if you have been exposed and infected. But not so great at early detection.

      If this test works, it would still be useful. The US ramp-up of the PCR test has been abysmal. An available, less accurate test is still more valuable than a non-available test. Furthermore, with that unavailability in the US, the test has basically been restricted to a very small subset of people who were already symptomatic, so the use case of an antibody test would be similar.

      The big problem with this test (aside from questions about whether it will work) is the 3 months until availability. So, for n

    • It still has its uses, if somebody comes in sick the hospital doesn't have to isolate someone for hours or even days while they wait for the test results.
    • We'll need both in the end. The antibody test will also be a cheaper way of showing us how many people were asymptomatic and potentially have immunity after seroconversion.
    • This test is for the many people who have a running nose or mild fever and want to rule out Covid-19. Instead of an expensive and lengthy test (that they won't get anyway), this new cheap and quick test can help.

  • Yet more evidence heat will reduce spread (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @05:58PM (#59838040)

    This is great news, more great news is we have further confirmation from Chinese scientists that there is a reduction of the R value [ssrn.com] (transmission rate) of Covid19 as temperature and humidity goes up.

    This backs up an earlier paper saying the same thing, and a recent Medum post also pointing out this factor [medium.com].

    So between the arrival of spring/summer, and much cheaper widespread testing to be had as this story notes, along with a number of possible treatments being found [thehindu.com] it may not be long before we can resume normal daily life outside the house.

    My guess is a few weeks to a month and most things will re-open in the U.S. It really depends on the increase in problems we see before then though, as if the death rate really shoots up it would keep things closed for a while.

  • For Sale by June? How's that help? (Score:3)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @06:00PM (#59838054)

    This will be mostly over in the USA by the time June rolls around, maybe as late as July. This test won't have much effect on it at this point.

    Soon we will have a pretty large wave of new reported cases due to the mass availability of the lab tests which where approved last week and are being deployed to labs over the next 3-4 days, we will ramp up to over 100K tests /Day in short order. Then we will likely discover that this is really more wide spread than anybody thought, with the vast majority of cases being asymptomatic to mild (IMHO). Watch the numbers.. We will quickly add cases, but watch for the knee of the curve, once we hit that, you can stop hording TP and get back into Stocks.

    • "This will be mostly over in the USA by the time June rolls around, maybe as late as July"

      That's nothing more than an assumption. Nobody knows if the Virus will relent come spring, furthermore a side-effect of flattening the curve is that the infection persists for longer.

      • Not really.. It's from looking at what happened in China, Italy and extrapolating a bit.

        This virus has been pretty fast spreading, and given that asymptomatic carriers have been passing it around and we are largely in "community spread" now in the USA. This puts us in an exponential growth phase as there is zero immunity in the heard. It's going to go pretty fast now.

        The only way this stretches out more than a couple of months is if the social distancing, closing schools and other public health measures

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rapjr ( 732628 )
      This might only be the first wave. It's looking like high heat and humidity reduce spread of the virus from an early report:

      https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... [ssrn.com]

      However it may just move to the Southern hemisphere and come back in the Fall. Also it's starting to look like even though children exhibit mild or no symptoms, they may still be able to spread it:

      https://academic.oup.com/cid/a... [oup.com]

      And no one has immunity, except possibly for the few people who have caught it and recovered so far, which makes it

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      This will be mostly over by the time June rolls around, maybe as late as July.

      Just like the invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan, eh?

      • This will be mostly over by the time June rolls around, maybe as late as July.

        Just like the invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan, eh?

        And, for all intents and purposes the WAR part was over pretty quick. The problem, as always, is keeping the peace. In the middle east, where us Americans are pretty much clueless about the social and religious norms, it's pretty hard to understand what peace means. I also don't recall ANYONE saying that the troops would be on their way home in 4 months...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          And, for all intents and purposes the WAR part was over pretty quick. The problem, as always, is keeping the peace.

          You could say the same about the Nazi invasion of Europe in 1939/1940.
          It could be a metaphor for Covid-2 in China today.

    • "This will be mostly over in the USA by the time June rolls around, maybe as late as July. "

      Yep, 2022.

  • 400% markup seems right for meds

  • 7 billion people divided by 28 milion tests a year .... 250 years.
  • By law Govt can not negotiate for prices with Big Pharma. Thank you Republicans. So the Govt must pay whatever they bill it for.

    Private insurance companies have provisions to pass the cost on to the government under these emergencies. So all Pharma execs are ecstatic.

    • By law Govt can not negotiate for prices with Big Pharma.

      Medicare can't negotiate, but the law the doesn't apply to the VA, DOD, and Medicaid, all of which negotiate drug prices.

  • A 24 hour test for merely $200 sounds like an excellent opportunity for hospitals.

    - Hostage taking medical fucks in the US.

  • Antibody tests like (apparently) this one are already available and manufactured in large quantities. They can be purchased from Chinese suppliers today for $1-$2 per test.

    As mentioned elsewhere, this type of test has low sensitivity for early case detection. In the first 7 days of an infection, less than 40% of patients have detectable antibody (IgM) levels. After 15 days, nearly 100% are detectable. So this test can be very helpful for detecting and quarantining older asymptomatic and mild cases, but are

  • Testing is not a cure. It does nothing itself to attack the virus.

    Even if we all knew, most people are confined to home :(

    The path to how that's an advantage always has a lot of sketchy explanation.

    A good sign it is false.

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