(Alliance News) - AstraZeneca aims to deliver a validated Covid-19 antibody test by the beginning of May that could be scaled up by the end of that month, its UK president has said.
Tom Keith-Roach told the PA news agency the focus is on antigen tests, which can tell people whether they have the virus, but work is also ongoing on an antibody test.
Antibody tests are seen as a vital route out of lockdown. They work by telling people if they have already had the virus and developed immunity, which can enable them to return to normal life.
AstraZeneca, Cambridge University and GlaxoSmithKline have joined forces for a testing facility in Cambridge with the aim of delivering 30,000 antigen tests by the start of May.
AstraZeneca and GSK are supporting three other testing centres in Milton Keynes, Alderley Park and Glasgow.
Keith-Roach said pharmaceutical firms are working together in the national interest to overcome global supply problems with the chemicals and swabs needed for testing.
He said testing kits have 79 components, including reagents and other chemicals, and six are subject to constraints.
"On each of those six components and swabs, we're working with the government, we're working with GSK," he said.
"We all obviously have global supply chains that reach into China, that reach into all of our trading partners around the world."
He said work was happening to leverage "collective procurement capacity and supply chains to really make sure that we can provide all of those components" to hit 30,000 tests a day.
Experts are also looking at alternative reagents or alternative components "to deal with and mitigate some of those risks", he said.
"But at this stage, we're confident that we're going to have the capacity to do 30,000 a day and that's why we felt able to make that commitment."
He said labs are dependant on the health system's capacity to "deliver to the front door of the lab" 30,000 swabs every day from healthcare workers and other people who need to be tested.
"We have a process for extracting and purifying the genetic material that's delivered in the swabs for testing, and then the conducting of those tests, and then returning the results to the health care system.
"So the testing machine will have the capacity to do 30,000 tests a day. But obviously, whether we can do 30,000 tests a day will depend on 30,000 swabs arriving at the front door."
Keith-Roach said the team in Cambridge is also working on antibody tests and will test on a small scale in the first week of May.
"We are working to deliver a validated test by the beginning of May that we could then scale up by the end of the month," he said.
He added that, in the last month, "there has been an extraordinarily constructive and open dialogue between us and government, and also all the partners that we need to work with, from the NHS to commercial organisations.
"I see an extraordinary kind of pulling together, of collective effort from all of the stakeholders involved in delivering these solutions on behalf of the government and the NHS."
Keith-Roach said the aim is for antigen and antibody tests to be carried out by people in their own homes.
"Clinicians across the country are trying to do absolutely everything possible right now to keep patients out of the healthcare system and to deliver diagnostics of care at home – to not expose patients for unnecessary risk," he said. "That will be the principle here."
It comes after Mark Stevenson, chief operating officer at US-based Thermo Fisher Scientific, said his firm could get the UK Government to its 100,000 tests per day target by the end of April.
The company will also initially produce antigen tests to tell people whether they have the virus.
Stevenson told the Radio 4 Today programme: "We began mobilising actually straight away after we learned about the Covid-19 outbreak and we designed the kit to identify the virus's unique genetic code.
"Then we worked in a way to test that, validate that in patients. And then we began to scale up our manufacturing to meet demand.
"We agreed with the UK that we would supply to meet their demand of more than 100,000 tests per day."
Stevenson said the kits are currently produced outside the UK but the firm had agreed to use its UK bases to produce kits for local supply.
"Here in the UK we have about 5,000 employees and about 26 sites, so we already have a very large presence," he said.
Stevenson said Amazon.com Inc was involved in moving the test kits from the firm's bases to UK testing centres.
source: PA
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