The National Institutes of Health (NIH), working in collaboration with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), announced a third round of contract awards for scale-up and manufacturing of new COVID-19 testing technologies, according to a report from the NIH. The six new Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative contracts total $98.35 million for point-of-care (POC) and other novel test approaches that provide new modes of sample collection, processing and return of results. Innovations in these new technologies include integration with smart devices, mobile-lab processing that can be deployed to COVID-19 hot spots, and test results available within minutes.
These awards are part of the RADx Tech program, focused on rapidly advancing early testing technologies. RADx Tech and the RADx Advanced Technology Platforms (RADx-ATP) —the latter for late-stage scale-up projects— are now supporting a combined portfolio of 22 companies for a total of $476.4 million in manufacturing expansion contracts. These six additional technologies are expected to add as many as 500,000 tests per day to the U.S. capacity by the end of 2020 and 1 million tests per day by early 2021. Combined with previous contracts announced in July and September, RADx Tech and RADx-ATP contracts are expected to increase test capacity by 2.7 million tests per day by the end of 2020.
“Since launching in April, the NIH RADx initiative has moved swiftly to facilitate critical expansion of early and late-stage testing technologies, as well as research to remove barriers to testing for underserved and vulnerable populations,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., PhD, “Each of the technologies emerging from the RADx initiative will play a critical role in extending accessibility to testing in diverse settings.”
The latest group of testing technologies have been optimized and assessed within the NIH RADx Tech development pipeline and have met the rigorous criteria for advancement. Factors such as speed, accuracy, cost and accessibility are key considerations for RADx support. The RADx initiative provides financial support and expertise to help companies reach milestones for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorization, scale-up and commercialization.
“The current round of awards support five technologies that can be delivered to the point of care and a powerful laboratory test,” said Bruce J. Tromberg, PhD, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and lead for RADx Tech, one of four programs of the NIH RADx initiative. “The technologies include an antigen test that provides results in 15 minutes, a viral RNA test deployed in mobile vans that can travel to COVID hotspots, and tests that require only saliva, nasal swabs or blood from a finger prick.”
