RE: Innova to start manufacturing in Wales25 May 2021 08:22
World’s biggest rapid Covid test maker to start producing in UK
California-based Innova to manufacture millions of tests each day in Wales from summer
Innova, which is owned by private equity firm Pasaca Capital, has supplied the UK with more than 1bn tests
Innova, which is owned by private equity firm Pasaca Capital, has supplied the UK with more than 1bn tests © Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty
May 25, 2021 4:00 am by Anna Gross in London
The world’s biggest rapid Covid-19 test maker will start manufacturing in the UK, with a factory in Wales set to begin producing millions of tests a day this summer.
Dan Elliott, chief executive of California-based Innova, told the Financial Times the company was “making large investments into the UK” to produce the tests for domestic use and export.
“The UK is a key market to us,” he said. “We’ve been a good partner to the government, the government’s been a good partner to us.”
The government has been heavily reliant on Innova to support its Moonshot testing vision despite its ambitions to bolster the UK’s diagnostics sector and the fact that the company has come under heavy scrutiny over the accuracy of its devices.
Innova, which is owned by private equity firm Pasaca Capital, has supplied the UK with more than 1bn tests produced in the Fujian province of China, as part of contracts worth more than £3bn.
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The UK, which is Innova’s biggest market for lateral flow devices, has spent more than £100m transporting these and other tests from China, according to publicly available contracts.
“We were ahead of the competition in terms of developing these products but also scaling at mass,” Elliott said, noting that Pasaca Capital invested tens of millions in the early months of the pandemic, followed by hundreds of millions in the second half of 2020.
The company is ramping up production of its tests worldwide and aims to reach 50m tests a day by the end of the year.
Elliott, who is also president and senior partner of Pasaca Capital, told the FT he expected demand for lateral flow tests to remain high for the next three to four years. “When you look at it, the more we travel the more mixing of variants there will be,” he said.
However, Innova’s tests have prompted questions in the UK over their accuracy and value. At the height of the pandemic, several studies found that they identified between 40 and 70 per cent of the cases of active infection found by the gold-standard PCR test.
“There’s a lack of understanding of what lateral flow testing is vs a PCR test,” Elliott said. “PCR is a test to determine if you’re infected, whereas an LFD [lateral flow device] tells you if you’re infectious.”
Hundreds of UK-based diagnostics companies have been vying for government contracts, and a slice of the £37bn that has been committed to the Test and Trace programme. But to date, only one — Derby-based SureScreen —
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