FDA grants EUA for new automated system for COVID-19 tests

Thermo Fisher Scientific has been granted Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the Thermo Fisher Scientific Amplitude Solution with the TaqPath COVID-19 High-Throughput Combo Kit.

The Amplitude Solution enables clinical and public health laboratories to scale PCR testing and process up to 8,000 samples in a single day with minimal staffing resources and a secured supply of kits, reagents and consumables to meet their testing needs. The Amplitude Solution has been implemented globally including labs in Europe and Japan.

Mark Stevenson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific, said: "While COVID-19 cases globally may be decreasing in some areas as vaccines become more widely available, there continues to be a demand for frequent routine testing to control future outbreaks. For population-wide testing programs, lab-based PCR is the best fitting technology, providing confidence in results, capacity to process thousands of samples a day, and consistent, reliable turnaround times. The Amplitude Solution can help support a systematic testing strategy by enabling labs to quickly scale their testing and begin processing high-volume samples, even with limited personnel." 

The Amplitude Solution is a molecular diagnostic testing system that helps clinical labs expand testing capacity by combining Thermo Fisher's extraction and real-time PCR instruments with liquid handling products from Tecan Group. The modular system utilises a high-throughput version of Thermo Fisher's Applied Biosystems TaqPath COVID-19 Combo Kit, which received EUA in March 2020, to process samples in four steps with minimal hands-on time and laboratory space requirements. The kit's multi-gene target design and updated interpretive software may help labs detect SARS-CoV-2 variants.