JapanesecChemical product maker Kurabo Industries will import and sell in Japan COVID-19 test kits developed by a Chinese firm that can detect new coronavirus in 15 minutes. This is much faster than other tests which take many or even days when they are sent to labs with large equipment.
Kurabo plans to sell the kits to research and testing institutions. One kit capable of testing 10 samples is priced at 25,000 yen ($240), excluding tax.
Kurabo to sell kits to detect new coronavirus in 15 mins next week https://t.co/WbQRwzNrIM pic.twitter.com/0Hoaj5XedD
— NE_sweN_odoyK (@Kyodo_News_EN) March 12, 2020
SOURCES – Kyodo News, Kurabo Industries, Jakarta News
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Ack.
This fast test has a big hidrance. It can detect the infection after 5-6 days. It detect the antibody against the virus.
A test like this is the only way to reasonably deal with this.
Everyone who shows up to work will be tested, every day. For western coorporations 24 usd/day is small change.
24 usd/test should be able to drop to 24 cents, only you scale up to make a billion tests pr day
That’s what happens when I don’t read the entire thing… (You’re correct)
It looks like a pregnancy test that has been relabeled for covid. Check the box to see where it was made.
I read that current tests costs $1200.
The big questions with any new test are sensitivity and accuracy. You don’t want false negatives while the patient is still contagious. But you also want to minimize false positives. Price and speed aren’t everything.
That image looks like the sensitivity would be pretty low.
It’ works out to $24 per test…pretty darn reasonable to me
$240! ouch, price gouge.
Ireland has also developed a 15 minute test
https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/irish-developed-kit-confirms-infection-in-15-minutes-39046582.html
What kind of test is this Japanese test?
There is work on a fast (~30 min) CRISPR-Cas 12 based lateral flow assay: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.06.20032334v1
There are also RNA gene chips, but the expectation is that you would need a lot of RNA (for example, grinding up a huge amounts of plants to look for plant RNA viruses), so reverse-transcriptase PCR to make billions of copy of a DNA version seems to be the standard Covid-19 test. But PCR takes equipment, time.