Healthcare software entrepreneurs Clive Minihan and Andrew Halliday have had a busy 16 months. Predicting that the need to process Covid tests at scale would require the process to be digitised, the pair formed the startup Recova-19 in May 2020. Their testing portal has now facilitated the processing of more than 1.2 million tests with a team that has now grown to 10. The cloud-based SaaS platform application has proved so successful that the duo now plan to use it to further support resilience in the health care system...

Testing is fundamental to identify and prevent the spread of the coronavirus but how can laboratories access automation technologies to respond to increased demand? Penny Pinnock, Sales Manager – Healthcare & Public Sector for Siemens Financial Services, explores how smart finance can help labs to leverage automation and enhance testing capacity. As the impact of the coronavirus epidemic continues to grow, laboratories play a key role in the practice of testing which can help prevent the spread of the virus...

PerkinElmer, Inc., a global leader committed to innovating for a healthier world, has announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the PerkinElmer® New Coronavirus Nucleic Acid Detection Kit for an additional indication that permits use of saliva as specimen type. The kit now has Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the qualitative detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2 in saliva specimens collected...

Agilent Technologies Inc. announces that researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in India and the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia have developed a rapid method for differentiating COVID-19-positive patients expected to show severe symptoms from those likely to experience only mild symptoms. The classification algorithm, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, is based on infrared spectra of blood plasma, acquired on an Agilent Cary 630 FTIR Spectrometer....

One of the UK’s leading technology educators and innovators CREDERSI have teamed up with Covid testing solutions company DAM Health  to create the world’s first virtual reality Covid-19 lab training syllabus.  The move is aimed at increasing the number of lab technicians being trained in the UK to meet a mass skills shortage and crisis. Research carried out by the Gatsby Foundation prior to COVID-19 indicated that, by 2030, the UK will require a further 700,000 Lab Technicians...

Autoscribe Informatics has announced the release of a LIMS specifically optimized for Covid testing. The Matrix Covid LIMS is pre-configured for fast deployment into laboratories performing Covid testing. The solution has already been deployed in several clinical diagnostic laboratories to drive efficiency and aid identification of Covid positive cases in the fight against the global pandemic....

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, U.K., have confirmed the speed, accuracy and simplicity of a novel, highly sensitive testing method for COVID-19 that can be deployed at entertainment venues, airport arrival terminals, and in remote settings where clinical testing laboratories are not available. The scientists used a three way comparison study to confirm that the Exponential Amplification Reaction (EXPAR) method is just as sensitive, but faster, than both PCR and LAMP tests...

A complete workflow developed by Promega Corporation enables wastewater testing laboratories, including public health organizations, to quickly assess the health of entire communities from a single sample. The Maxwell® RSC Enviro Total Nucleic Acid Kit and Wizard^® Enviro Total Nucleic Acid Kit join a growing portfolio of products that support wastewater surveillance to monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2....

Opening a new facility, Biotage triples its production capacity for equipment crucial in the supply chain for the production of mRNA vaccines. Biotage is one of the few companies offering a complete solution and ready to go off-the-shelf products for the purification of large-scale lipids, used in mRNA vaccine development and production. Expanding its production capacity of large-scale flash columns by 300 per cent, Biotage is now helping pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturers’ scale up lipid production for COVID-19 vaccines...

Cherwell Laboratories, specialists in cleanroom microbiology solutions, announces that it has recently delivered its biggest ever single order for microbial air sampling equipment to support the large-scale manufacturing programme for COVID-19 vaccine supply. The new SAS air sampling equipment will be used for the environmental monitoring of the newly built UK-based Grade A manufacturing facilities of a key specialty vaccine company.

Developed by Curiosity Diagnostics, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Scope Fluidics S.A., the PCR|ONE SARS-CoV-2 panel is now CE-marked and can be introduced to the European market. The PCR|ONE SARS-CoV-2 panel is one of the fastest tests in the world, and is uniquely suited for near patient testing.  The SARS-CoV-2 product expand the menu of test available on the PCR|ONE system, which already includes methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA/MSSA panel)....

As a global leading supplier of of raw materials, antibodies, and reagents for bio-technology industry, Creative Diagnostics recently launched a variety of lentiviral SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus from a wide range of coronavirus species. Different vectors can be used to express different reporters such as EGFP or luciferase, allowing the monitoring of viral entry into host cells by a variety of means....

Illumina, Inc. has donated $1 million in sequencing capabilities to the Molecular Diagnostic Reference Laboratory at Kasturba Hospital, in the Municipal Corporate of Greater Mumbai, to help expand SARS-CoV-2 sequencing capabilities in the region and support the broader genomic surveillance effort across India. Kasturba Hospital was the first hospital in Mumbai to begin sequencing SARS-CoV-2 this year and will examine how variants of the virus are being spread across India....

Nanopharm Ltd., an Aptar Pharma company and leader in contract research and development of orally inhaled and nasally delivered drug products (OINDP) and Leyden Labs, a company targeting commonalities of viral families to protect humanity from known and future viruses, have announced that they have entered into an agreement to develop nasal sprays that may provide broad protection against respiratory viruses...

PharmEnable, an AI drug discovery company unlocking challenging biological targets, announces that it has entered into a drug discovery collaboration with LifeArc, an independent UK medical research charity, to apply their respective technologies and expertise to discover novel oral antiviral drugs with activity against coronaviruses....

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Dr Mason and his team set about turning their knowledge of functional genomics to sequencing and understanding the clinical impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The lab developed multiple methods to detect infections, track strain evolution, and identify biomarkers of disease course to assist with clinical identification and treatment....

MolGen B.V., a single-source supplier of DNA/RNA extraction technology and services for the life sciences and biotechnology, announce its entrance into the U.S. market with the launch of MolGen USA, a joint venture with California-based, laboratory automation experts Todaro Robotics. MolGen USA will operate a complete commercial team and product showroom at the San Diego facility....

Severe COVID-19 and Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) share some common pathogenic mechanisms, according to a new study. The observations from the study – published in JCI Insight and led by the University of Glasgow’s Research into Inflammatory Arthritis Centre (RACE) in collaboration with the Fondazione A.Gemelli IRCCS in Italy –could help development of new treatment strategies for severe COVID-19...

SpeeDx Pty, Ltd. and MolGen announced the signing of an agreement to collaborate on supply and distribution of clinical diagnostics products and instrumentation across Europe and Asia Pacific. The partnership links specimen handling, nucleic acid extraction, assay set-up, amplification, and results reporting in a seamless integration of the companies technologies...