Delays for test results may cease as kit helps detect COVID-19 in 40mins

Facing dangerous delays during emergencies in hospitals may cease as Nigeria’s new rapid test kit helps hospitals detect the Covid-19 status of patients within 40 minutes.

Private laboratories licensed to conduct the test currently tout less than 24 hours as the best deliverable while government reference laboratories often take 96 hours and even more to release results.

But the SARS COV-2 Isothermal Molecular Assay, a point of care test developed by Nigeria Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), will decentralise testing further from the few selected laboratories to secondary and elementary hospitals willing to adopt it.

Patients who suddenly slip into emergency will be able to avoid both the long queue of samples scheduled for molecular analysis at government-run labs as well as the N50,400 charge attached to obtaining test from private labs.

Essentially, more lives can be saved with clinical emergencies administered in a shorter time.

According to Babatunde Salako, NIMR director-general, the development of the test kit was backed with N20 million by FATE Foundation, a non-profit organisation that enables businesses.
However, the production is yet to go commercial as the institute anticipates partnership with indigenous pharmaceutical companies to circulate it, Rosemary Audu, head of virology at NIMR, informs BusinessDay.

Responding to how the new test kit will impact those aiming to test before travelling abroad, she explains that the adoption may still be limited to in-country usage until the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 lifts the restriction on travel purpose testing to private labs.

“It will take a while for other facilities to get it. In the meantime, testing will still be done in private facilities until it is widely available for many more facilities,” she said.

Since Nigeria’s public health systems began to grapple with Covid-19, circulation of testing has been a critical challenge that has placed patients at the short end of the stick.

Patients who manifest coronavirus symptoms are compulsorily subjected to test that the results cannot be quickly obtained for life-saving clinical intervention.

Even for non-coronavirus patients suffering from acute respiratory distress, pneumonia and malaria with symptoms suggestive of Sars-Cov2 infection, their chances of survival are often wasted because health workers short of personal protective equipment (PPE) would rather subject them to the struggle for testing than risk contracting the virus.

At the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), for instance, BusinessDay understands that the delay for Covid-19 test still stands in the way of emergency care, apart from the constant problem of lack of beds.

Patients due for surgery often join the queue of several others before they can qualify for surgery theatre and often get the cost PPE for healthcare workers attending to them squeezed in their bills.

Far from its target of conducting 10 million tests, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has only managed to test 520,797 samples as of October 1, marking 5.2 percent of its goal.

The decline in the rate of daily infection in September led the public into thinking Covid-19 was finally ebbing into obscurity in the country until the centre explained it was an offshoot 36 percent drop in testing in August.

“But as it is, we have witnessed a progressive decline in the testing rates across various states as a result of lower sample collection rate. In the month of August, we discovered that testing rate declined by 36 percent while test positivity declined by 25 percent,” Chinwe Ochu, NCDC’s head of Prevention Programmes and Knowledge Management Department said via the official NCDC Twitter handle.

But now, hospitals can have access to these points of care such that they can test and get the results immediately to determine whether to go on and manage patients using extra caution if they are positive or just the standard method of management, Audu states.

In terms of market traction, Audu notes it has a ready market but partnership nods from investors will still determine when circulation begins.

Unlike the rapid test that the NCDC earlier discouraged for its false prediction and lack of specificity, the Isothermal Molecular Assay is a nucleic acid test that is based on a polymerase chain reaction. It is the same as the test currently run at full-fledged labs like that of NIMR but comparable to rapid test. It is superior to the antibody test.

Differentiating further, the head of virology explains that rapid test kits only indicate if an individual has been exposed to the virus and has developed antibodies ─ a protein produced mainly by plasma cells, used by the immune system to neutralise pathogens such as bacteria and viruses.

It often fails to give information on current infection, inadvertently expand the cycle of coronavirus transmission.

But a nucleic acid based test kit gives this information within a shorter timeframe and comes cheaper.