Beckman Coulter and Thermo Fisher to Help HHS Expand US Diagnostic Labs’ COVID-19 Testing Capacity

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make combined investments of USD 6.5 million in two commercial diagnostic laboratories to expand their capacity for conducting up to four million additional SARS-CoV-2 tests per month.

The investments in Aegis Sciences Corporation (Nashville, TN, USA) and Sonic Healthcare USA (Austin, TX, USA) will provide critical laboratory equipment supplied by Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (Brea, CA, USA) and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (Waltham, MA, USA), and increase staffing and infrastructure to allow the US to perform an additional one million tests each week by early October.

In response to HHS investment, Aegis Sciences will rapidly expand its laboratory workforce and begin construction on new laboratory space at its testing facilities to meet its goal of processing more than 60,000 test samples per day beginning in September. With its expanded daily testing capacity, Aegis Sciences has agreed to partner with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health to perform testing of samples from select locations with vulnerable populations. These tests will return results in under 48 hours. Sonic Healthcare is collaborating closely with HHS to expeditiously ramp up their testing capacity at eight SARS-CoV-2 testing facilities. HHS will provide access to instrumentation and supplies necessary to rapidly expand the scope and expedite the timeline of their ongoing capacity expansion plans. The new testing capacity will significantly enhance patient access to SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing across the US.

Beckman Coulter will provide equipment that will enable laboratories to optimize their workflow, thereby increasing SARS-CoV-2 testing by up to 10,000 tests each day at 10 separate sites totaling an increase of 100,000 per day across the US. Thermo Fisher is supplying HHS with 56 KingFisher Flex extraction and purification systems and 40 QuantStudio 7 Flex Real-time polymerise chain reaction (PCR) tests. Each PCR test can run 384 samples at a time. These 96 systems which are capable of running more than 140,000 samples per day will be placed at the laboratories of Aegis Sciences and Sonic Healthcare around the US.

"We are committed to leveraging every possible opportunity to expand the nation's SARS-CoV-2 testing capacity over the next several months," said Assistant Secretary for Health ADM Brett Giroir, M.D. "For this opportunity, we were able to match available instrumentation and reagents with commercial labs that were ready to immediately expand their services. We are honored to work with these labs and life sciences tools companies to ensure increased access to testing as may be needed this fall."

Related Links:

Aegis Sciences Corporation
Sonic Healthcare USA
Beckman Coulter Life Sciences
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.