Kiwi company develops new Covid-19 test
Expected to be 10 times cheaper than current methods, the fast product can also tell who has been infected or vaccinated. Geraden Cann reports.
An Auckland-based biotech company is about to begin trials with the US Food and Drug Administration for a Covid-19 test that is expected to be 10 times cheaper and three times quicker than traditional methods.
The trials of Pictor’s test are due to wrap up in July, and chief operating officer Howard Moore said he expected to take the product to market by October.
Before that happened, Moore said Pictor would have to import Covid-positive samples into New Zealand from elsewhere in the world to complete testing.
Moore said Pictor’s test had the potential to make feasible the testing of large populations for the virus – and the efficiency of Covid-19 vaccines.
Pictor’s technology works similarly to traditional and already widely-used Elisa tests, which combine a reagent with a patient’s blood sample to discover if the person had a particular disease.
A reagent is a substance or mixture that’s added to a sample to cause a chemical reaction.
The savings Pictor offers is achievable by using nano quantities of reagent, which costs roughly $700 per milligram.
Moore said Pictor’s technique used roughly a 70th of the amount of reagent compared to traditional methods.
It could also test multiple patients’ blood on a single testing pallet, and check for multiple types of protein associated with Covid19, creating a more reliable positive or negative test result.
‘‘We have lined up three laboratories in the US, and we’ve shown them the data from our internal testing, and they are really excited about it.
‘‘They are particularly excited because our antibody test will differentiate between people who have got antibodies as a result of being either infected with the disease and who has been vaccinated.
‘‘That’s one of our points of difference.’’ Early last year Pictor received a grant of $500,000 from the $25 million Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Covid-19 Innovation Acceleration Fund to advance its PictArray Covid-19 test.
To help speed up development, the company’s Parnell labs just received a new $500,000 piece of lab equipment from Germany capable of handling larger sample sizes.
It’s not the only disease Pictor is using its technology to tackle.
It already provides kits to diagnose diseases in pregnant women, such as rubella and herpes simplex viruses, another for detecting hepatitis, which is an inflammation of the liver, and another for diagnosing connective tissue diseases.
In 2020 Pictor also concluded a research agreement with the Ministry for Primary Industries, DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb to develop a more sensitive diagnostic for M. bovis.
The programme has been allocated up to $30 million for M. bovis research projects.
Pictor was founded in 2005. In August last year it established Pictor Inc in the US and appointed Thomas Schlumpberger as its new CEO, based in San Francisco.