US invests $232m to produce Covid-19 tests for home use

Move to send out Ellume tests over the counter could help to solve lack of testing in country

The US government is investing $231.8 million to increase production of Covid-19 tests that can be done at home and do not require a prescription.

Australian test maker Ellume said it would deliver 8.5 million tests this year.

It plans to open its first US factory, which will increase global production by at least half a million tests a day from the current 100,000.

“We want to help the US reopen as safely and as quickly as possible,” said Ellume chief executive Sean Parsons.

“We are prioritising our partnership with the US government to mobilise tests quickly.”

The Ellume deal provides an early look at how President Joe Biden plans to expand Covid-19 testing in the US.

His government will probably encounter the same barriers as the Trump administration faced, it can take months or years to produce enough tests.

Lack of tests and high prices for them have been major impediments to consumer access.

“Making easier to use tests available to every American is a high priority with obvious benefits,” Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House’s Covid-19 team, said on Monday.

Making more tests should bring down costs in “a chicken-and-egg problem that I think we have taken a step to solve today, by creating mass production so that we will have tens of millions of these tests out there", Mr Slavitt said.

Ellume’s goal is to produce the extra 500,000 tests daily by the end of the year, a spokeswoman said.

The company is in talks with regional and state leaders on where to build the factory, she said.

Ellume’s test received emergency clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in December to be bought without prescription and used at home, but it is not yet available in the US, the spokeswoman said.

The product is a single-use, $30 test that can be administered with a nasal swab. It detects proteins on the surface of the coronavirus in 15 minutes, delivering the results to an app.

Ellume took part in the National Institute of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics programme, through which it received about $30m to increase manufacturing.

The company could have capacity for a million tests a day by mid-2021, Mr Parsons told Bloomberg News.

Asked on Monday about the test’s $30 price and whether there would be enough for widespread screening, Mr Slavitt said he did not have a complete answer.

“Life doesn’t change until we create more ubiquitous capability, not only around what we’ve talked about here, vaccines, but also testing,” he said.