The Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland and National Virus Reference Laboratory (NVRL) at University College Dublin (UCD) have entered into an agreement with Genuity Science™ (Ireland) Limited (formerly known as “Genomics Medicine (Ireland) Limited”) for the supply of reagents that will enable the NVRL to significantly ramp up testing of people with suspected COVID-19.
Reagents for the production of up to 900,000 tests have been secured by Genuity Science™ and the NVRL, with components for the first 200,000 already delivered to its laboratory in Cherrywood, Dublin. The laboratory will operate seven days a week to formulate these reagents for the NVRL and its partner laboratories, who are the primary testing centers for COVID-19. This will enable the NVRL to ramp up to 10,000 tests per day in the coming weeks supporting a more rapid analysis of samples and a quicker turn-around of test results to clinicians.
Genuity Science’s expert team led by Dr Patrick Buckley has also been providing technical advice and expertise to the NVRL and its partner laboratories on process automation to help them significantly scale up their capacity to undertake large-scale testing.
Dr Cillian De Gascun, Consultant Virologist and Director, National Virus Reference Laboratory, UCD said: “Diagnostic testing for COVID-19 is critical to tracking the virus, understanding epidemiology, informing case management, and to suppressing transmission. Our partnership with Genuity Science™ will significantly support our efforts to achieve scale in our laboratory. Genuity Science’s rapid response in producing reagents for NVRL will be pivotal in our understanding of the outbreak and help in deciding when we can begin to lift current movement restrictions.”
Dr Anne Jones, of Genuity Science™ (Ireland) Limited said: “We are proud to be able to support the national effort on COVID-19. We have been able to rapidly deploy our genomics and process skills in partnership with the NVRL team to enable a significant increase in the numbers of tests each day, and this most importantly supports patients and those anxiously awaiting test results.”
