Abbott Brings Rapid Testing to the Front Lines

Abbott’s new ID NOW COVID-19 test, which earned emergency use authorization (EUA) from FDA last week, was highlighted during President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 taskforce press briefing on March 30. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn spoke about the rapid approval of Abbott’s point-of-care test for COVID-19. “Normally these tests take months to develop,” Hahn noted during the briefing. “I was on the phone today with the Abbott CEO who told me this is normally a 9- to 12-month approach to developing a point-of-care test. They did this in collaboration with FDA and the U.S. government in just a few weeks.” MD+DI checked in with Abbott and heard from Norman Moore, PhD, scientific affairs, infectious diseases, Abbott, who said that “while developing new molecular tests normally takes years, our expert teams of scientists worked around the clock to compress the timeframe down to weeks.” The new COVID-19 test runs on Abbott's portable molecular-testing ID NOW platform—the unit was displayed sitting on a table during the White House briefing. The platform was introduced in 2014 and is widely used for Influenza A and B, Strep A, and RSV testing in the United States. Such molecular testing detects the presence of a virus by identifying a small section of the virus's genome, then amplifying that portion until there'...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: IVD Source Type: news