Feb. 27, 2020—Qiagen announced it has shipped its newly developed QIAstat-Dx Respiratory Panel 2019-nCoV test kit to four hospitals in China for evaluation and is in the process of shipping QIAstat-Dx testing kits to public health institutions in other regions, including Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
The panel is a new version of the existing QIAstat-Dx Respiratory Panel for differential analysis of 21 viral and bacterial pathogens in respiratory syndromes. Once the SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced in January, the company developed two highly sensitive assays to detect SARS-CoV-2 targeting Orb1ab and the E gene.
The expanded panel is being evaluated at the Bichat-Claude Bernard Hospital in Paris. “After more than a year of experience using the existing QIAstat-Dx Respiratory Panel to evaluate patients coming into our emergency department with respiratory syndromes, we are evaluating the new panel with SARS-CoV-2 against RT-PCR testing using WHO-recommended protocols,” Benoit Visseaux, PhD, associate professor of virology at Bichat-Claude Bernard Hospital, said in a Qiagen press release. “The QIAstat-Dx solution can provide results in about one hour, with high sensitivity and specificity and minimal hands-on time for hospital or laboratory personnel.”