Abbott Labs receives FDA emergency use authorization for their 15-minute, $5 COVID-19 test
The FDA has granted emergency use authorization to Abbott Laboratories for the company’s BinaxNOW, a 15-minute COVID-19 test that will be priced at $5.
Abbott says BinaxNOW works without relying on lab equipment – at a time when labs can take as long as two weeks to produce results – and uses a nasal swab and a small reactive card that can be administered by a range of healthcare workers, including pharmacists.
BinaxNOW is an antigen test, the size of a credit card, with no equipment required and results delivered in 15 minutes, using proven lateral flow technology. It lets trained healthcare providers test a lot of people for active infections, a lot faster, on a single-use test.
Rapid antigen tests perform well while eliminating the waiting game. While lab tests have the highest sensitivity, you have the trade-off of not knowing results for several days and the risk of infecting others. Rapid tests deliver actionable results quickly so that infected patients can immediately begin self-quarantine. This test, along with others like it, is risk reduction on a community scale.
BinaxNOW is also transformative in Abbott Lab’s ability to produce it in large volumes, which is what the country needs more than anything today.
The company plans to ship “tens of millions’ of test in September, ramping to 50M tests per month by the end of October. The new test “can be used at a massive scale to help overcome the current waiting game for test results,” according to John Hackett, divisional VP of applied research and technology at Abbott Diagnostics.
Abbott Labs is pairing BinaxNOW rapid test with a mobile app, called NAVICA™, which works like a secure digital “boarding pass” that can be scanned to enter organizations and other places where people gather. This combination of rapid test and mobile app stands as game-changing technology.
References:
- https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/27/abbott-labs-ceo-testing-covid-19-at-massive-scale-is-best-strategy.
- https://www.abbott.com/BinaxNOW-Test-NAVICA-App.html