RE: Oryx20 Apr 2020 14:50
The Race Toward the Antibody Test Kits
April 20, 2020
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Belcourtoi
Omega Diagnostics Group PLC is a UK-based holding company. The company, along with its subsidiaries, is principally engaged in the manufacture, development and distribution of medical diagnostic products.
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Omega has a Market Cap of £48m (at the time of writing), the company ticker is #ODX and the shares trade on the AIM market on the London Stock Exchange.
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On April 9th, 2020, the company announced it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") with three other companies from across the UK, in conjunction with the University of Oxford to form the UK Rapid Test Consortium ("UK-RTC") in order to jointly develop and manufacture a COVID-19 Point of Care antibody test as part of the Government's five pillar national testing strategy for COVID-19.
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
The UK-RTC which was announced by the UK Government on April 8th, 2020, comprises:
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Omega Diagnosis "ODX",
Abingdon Health Limited,
BBI Solutions Limited,
CIGA Healthcare Limited,
and the University of Oxford.
The consortium was formed at the request of the UK Government to support the development and manufacturing scale-up of a COVID-19 lateral flow antibody test ("COVID-19 Rapid Test") to determine whether people have developed immunity after contracting the virus.
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The MOU is for an initial six months period, all parties will work together and utilise their combined flow test design and manufacturing expertise to optimise the design and accelerate the scale-up and manufacturing of the COVID-19 Rapid Test.
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Requirements, Specification & Design Phase
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Colin King CEO of Omega Diagnosis has confirmed that the requirement and specification of the product has already been set, they include, time, i.e. duration between test and results, reliability/accuracy of results, size etc. The consortium is currently working on the design and will soon need to agree and freeze the design to start the Verification and Validation phase, which basically ensures the product meets all requirements and can achieve its purpose.
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According to the specifications the test results will be in minutes, however the exact time will be determined during development. The COVID-19 Rapid Test is an antibody test, it will show if a person has had the virus and recovered. Antibodies will be present which in theory demonstrates that person will have immunity. The thinking is based on that COVID-19 will behave in a similar way to how SARS behaved. These test kits will be key to helping ease the lockdown and see the UK slowly and gradually return to normality, which adds to the urgency and speed at which the UK-RTC is working on.
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Over last few weeks the UK Government spent over £16m on test kits that were found to be insufficiently accurate by a laboratory at Oxford University, over 500,000 of these test kits are now of no use to the UK. The U