Seegene Inc., South Korea’s leading molecular diagnostics company, announced the upcoming launch of the Allplex™ SARS-CoV-2 Fast PCR Assay, which can deliver PCR results in just 60 minutes. The company says that this assay is expected to reduce the total turnaround time to a third and expand testing capacity up to 3 times for hospitals and laboratories without additional instruments or compromise on accuracy.
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Reduction of the turnaround time was attributable to two primary reasons: 1) the application of a novel enzyme developed by Seegene, which reduces PCR process time to half. 2) Seegene’s innovative extraction-free method, which can let Allplex™ SARS-CoV-2 Fast PCR Assay be available without the extraction of the sample preparation in PCR-based tests. This drastically reduces the total turnaround time for each result. As such, the new assay lessens the amount of hands-on processing time required, allowing facilities to triple their testing capacity in the same hour.
“This assay will be the optimized choice for laboratories and hospitals where they conduct large-scale testing as it helps them immediately expand the testing capacity with lessening the burden of healthcare workers,” said Ho Yi, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of Seegene. “For the time being, we plan to target large-scale testing markets in more than 60 countries all across the globe. The next step in our journey is to develop a new gold-standard molecular diagnostic assay that fully matches the speed of antigen tests with the same degree of accuracy as PCR test”
The Allplex™ SARS-CoV-2 Fast PCR Assay targets three COVID-19 genes––E, RdRP, and N–– to reliably detect COVID-19 regardless of the variants. According to clinical research conducted by 17 laboratories in seven countries, this assay showed the same or better accuracy for the COVID-19 detection as other diagnostic tests available in the market.