RE: FT21 Jan 2021 13:59
This is the article, all about UK companies ...
The UK government is aiming to produce 2m rapid Covid-19 tests per day as it
seeks to shake off its dependence on foreign producers for its “Moonshot” mass
screening vision.
The government has paid consulting firm PA Consulting £6.2m to set out plans to
scale up manufacturing of testing technologies in the UK, according to a publicly
available contract.
Ministers have been intent on developing a domestic diagnostics industry since
early in the pandemic, and set out their ambition to “build a mass-testing capacity
at a completely new scale” as part of the UK’s testing strategy in April 2020.
The main focus of the plan outlined in the PA Consulting contract is to find
suitable British manufacturers of lateral flow devices (LFDs), which provide results
in under 30 minutes, and scale up manufacturing to reach 2m tests a day by April
2021.
Unlike conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which look for the
virus’s genetic material and can take up to a day to process, LFDs do not need to be
analysed in a laboratory. The tests look for protein antigens that live on a virus’s
surface, and work by adding a liquid reagent to a saliva or nasal swab sample.
LCDs have been the subject of intense criticism after several studies found they
miss up to 60 per cent of positive cases. But on Wednesday researchers at Oxford
university released a paper which found that the tests pick up between 83 and 90
per cent of cases where a person is infectious.
The authors said that previous studies compared LFDs to the gold-standard PCR
tests, which “overshoot” by picking up pre and post-coronavirus infectiousness.
The Oxford study found that by contrast, LFDs are very good at finding individuals
who have a high viral load and are responsible for the majority of onwards
transmission.
The UK has been almost entirely reliant on limited supplies of LFDs from the US,
Korea and China and is desperate to scale up domestic production. The
department of health has spent £88m simply on transporting tests from China to
the UK since the beginning of the pandemic, according to publicly available
contracts.
“We’re under strict instructions to find UK-based LFDs. It’s a question of security
of supply,” said John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford university, who
has been working with the government on identifying and validating new
technologies.
The UK government has so far invested at least £1.5bn in LFDs — and last week
closed a tender worth a further £912m. The bulk of the spending has gone to the
US company Innova, which has received £1bn in contracts to procure hundreds of
millions of devices.
Earlier this month, the government announced it had also started buying the first
UK-produced test in the government’s lateral flow arsenal from a Derby-based
company called SureScreen.
Mass screening of people without symptoms is set to play a leading role in the
government’s pathway
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