UK to release quick finger-prick COVID-19 antibody testing kits

United Kingdom has conducted successful trials of a quick coronavirus antibody test and is now planning to release it for the public.

The home tests will be free of cost and will need only a small prick, the local media reported. The results of these tests will be available in merely 20 minutes.

"This rapid test appears to be truly amazing, and it shows we can do this ourselves," said Sir John Bell, Oxford's Regius Professor of Medicine who leads the British government's antibody testing programme.

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"If coronavirus is like flu and people need an annual vaccine, we will need mass antibody testing to measure people's antibody response to that vaccine. That's part of the plan," explained Dr Hand.

The new tests have been developed by the UK Rapid Test Consortium (UK-RTC), a partnership between Oxford University and UK diagnostics companies including Abingdon Health based in York.

The trials for this test were conducted in the month of June and98.6 per cent results, of 300 people,were accurate. The test can help determine a person has been exposed to the novel coronavirus or not.

The final nod from the regulatory is still pending, but several facilities have started manufacturing prototypes for the same in hope that the regulatory will give a green signal to the easy antibody test kits.

"We've had two shifts of R&D personnel working day and night, seven days a week. This sort of development programme would normally take a year. We've done it in 10 weeks. We're now scaling up with our partners to

produce hundreds of thousands of doses every month," saidDr Chris Hand, the leader of the UK-RTC and chairman of Abingdon Health.

The tests will first be sent to hospitals and medical personnel, who will send in data to the concerned authorities to help maintain a central database. After success of this, the testing kits will be made available to the general public of the country.

A UK Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "We have received an extraordinary response to our call to action to supply antibody tests, and we continue to work with industry to identify further tests that are safe and accurate to be used at home.