Info for you all24 Feb 2020 19:34
2019-nCoV qPCR kit
Adam Herridge, Product Manager at Primerdesign, talks to rapidmicrobiology.com about how his team responded to the growing novel coronavirus epidemic and delivered the genesig 2019-nCoV qPCR Kit in rapid time. It was the first diagnostics kit to be made in Europe with 100% specificity, it is exceptional value for money and is advantageous to low-resource and field-use scenarios.
Q: Primerdesign have brought this kit to market quickly – is it record time? When did you start working on it?
A: Primerdesign was the first European Medical Diagnostics company to produce a commercially available molecular detection kit specifically for 2019-nCoV. Development of the kit started as soon as it was apparent that the virus was spreading and becoming a global health threat; the team managed to develop and optimise a kit within two weeks.
Q: What technology does the kit use and what specimens are suitable?
A: The genesig 2019-nCoV uses qPCR (quantitative polymerase chain reaction) through Taqman-style probe cleavage to generate a fluorescent signal in the presence of and detection for this novel Coronavirus strain. Any high-quality nucleic acid extraction is a suitable sample for the test. In this instance, samplers are typically using a nasopharyngeal swab
Q: What other instrumentation/equipment is needed?
A: A nucleic acid extraction kit is needed first to prepare the patient sample. This can be a manual or automated process, which involves lysis and purification of the sample, to be ready for testing. Once extraction is complete, the sample, along with our reagents, are loaded on to a qPCR instrument, which amplifies the nucleic acids and interprets the data to provide a result to the user
Q: What sort of lab/applications is it intended for?
A: The kit is designed so that any molecular lab with the ability to perform qPCR can use our assay. Our reagents, including master mix, come lyophilised. This means shipping and storage at ambient temperature are possible. This allows transportation to tropical climates and eliminates the need for refrigeration. This gives the added advantage of enabling testing to be performed in field laboratories and other low resource settings, which otherwise, may not have been possible. Once the sample is ready for testing, the user will use a qPCR instrument
Q: How can labs be confident in the results?
A: With our Advanced format kit, the user is provided with a positive control, an internal extraction control, an endogenous control and pure H2O. The positive control is used to show that a successful PCR has occurred, and for quantification of a sample. An internal extraction control is used in the sample setup and qPCR, which then allows an individual to be confident of a high-quality extraction. The endogenous control is used to show the presence of sufficient and appropriate sample input (e.g. the swab had the correct amount of sample on it). And the pure H2O is used to pro