As COVID-19 continues to spread globally, LGC, an international leader in the life sciences tools sector, is working closely with its customers and other stakeholders to support the global response to the epidemic.
Many private companies and clinical testing laboratories are developing SARS-CoV-2 test kits to support surveillance and diagnosis. Governments are using data generated from these tests to inform public health action. LGC has been expediting its production of critical kit components such as controls, probes and primers to ensure products are available at the point of need.
Tim Robinson, CEO, LGC said, “By accelerating and ramping up the manufacture of our products, we are fully supporting the rapid mobilisation of critical components available for labs to use in their tests. We are working closely with the relevant government agencies and laboratories across the world, supplying them with the reference materials and controls and oligo chemistry reagents required to develop their diagnostic solutions. We are doing everything we can to accelerate delivery and scale our capacity and output in order to deliver these critical elements and help meet our customers’ testing demands.”
LGC is working with many government and regulatory agencies, including in the US, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help them meet their diagnostic demands.
LGC has previously announced the development of molecular reference materials for coronavirus, utilising its proprietary AccuPlex™ recombinant technology. AccuPlex control materials, which are used by diagnostic manufacturers to complete their assay validation activities, and by clinical laboratories to verify testing accuracy, mimic wild-type pathogenic viruses, whilst being safe, non-infectious, and replication-deficient. They serve as true, full-process, quality control solutions that challenge the entire diagnostic workflow, making them a valuable alternative to infectious materials.
Meanwhile, LGC’s probe and primer kit has recently been qualified and approved (lot 143503) by the CDC. These probes and primers are part of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, used in detection kits across the world. LGC is the inventor of specific chemistries, such as Black Hole Quencher® (BHQ®), BlackBerry® Quencher (BBQ-650®) and other critical dyes and components for diagnostic kit developers. It has previously provided detection solutions for viruses including seasonal influenza, H1N1 (swine flu), Chikungunya, Zika and Ebola.