Oxford Nanopore will be releasing its new portable COVID-19 testing device called LamPORE. With loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and nanopore sequencing, the entire process of testing samples takes about an hour. In several weeks, the mass screening will be possible.
The device is a game-changer as testing happens in real-time, at the point of infection. Immediate action to prevent further infection in an area can be taken on the same day. All public health and service workers can potentially be tested every week before going to their frontline work.
About the size of a disk drive, LamPORE's swab analyses also save the time it takes to send samples to laboratories. The handheld version costs about $1200.
Another version is the size of a home printer, intended for offices and factories.
COVID-19 Mass Screening in Just 24 Hours
This is an excellent advancement towards safety precautions, especially for corporations that plan to test millions of employees globally.
Thousands of samples can be tested simultaneously since each one has a unique barcode.
Patients today currently wait for at least 24 hours before receiving test results, while LamPORE can test up to 300,000 samples within the same time frame.
CEO Gordon Sanghera said that 'In the next six to eight weeks, we will be able to hit one million tests a month, and we can double that and double it again.'
Besides human testing, the swab tests can also analyze hard surfaces such as desk counters and door handles for traces of COVID-19.
UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, commented in a press conference that this technological breakthrough could 'deliver testing with a rapid turnaround,' in addition to several other innovations.
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Unity in the Fight Against Coronavirus
In a neighboring nation, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics are developing a new kind of antibody testing kit, which shows results in a matter of minutes.
In the UK alone, around 5% of its people are positive with coronavirus antibodies.
The clinic in South Wales has been studying the effectivity of two different types of testing: molecular and serological.
Molecular testing, with a basic swab specimen, can detect current SARS-CoV-2 in one's body.
On the other hand, serological testing takes a blood specimen and detects past or current coronavirus exposure. These test results can also help with vaccine and therapy development.
Ortho Clinical Diagnostics' new blood testing kit proves to be better than the former tests developed since it can also help identify people candidates for plasma therapy and blood donations.
Chris Smith, the company's CEO, informed that approximately 150 tests could be processed per hour, prioritizing areas of greatest need first.
Their analyzer machine can test up to 35,000 samples a day, Smith shares, and the company has produced several hundred thousand of these kits in April, progressing to 1 million kits per week in May.
Vaughan Gething, the Health Minister of Wales, will soon announce how both the newly announced COVID-19 Testing LamPORE machine and Ortho Clinical Diagnostics' kit 'will fit into the strategy and when our critical workers and the general public will be able to get access to them.'
