Quest Diagnostics announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for a new laboratory technique that speeds the process of extracting viral RNA from specimens and will enable the company to expand its daily capacity of COVID-19 molecular diagnostic tests on behalf of patients in the United States.
"Laboratory innovation is key to optimizing testing capacity for COVID-19," said Steve Rusckowski, Chairman, Chief Executive and President, Quest Diagnostics. "We appreciate the collaboration of the FDA to bring this technique to several of our labs spanning the U.S. With more testing capacity, we expect to improve turnaround times for our customers and patients."
With the new FDA EUA, five of the company's laboratories in the U.S. may now run this new RNA extraction method, including on pooled specimens. Those laboratories are well situated geographically to address high testing demand in states where the virus has been surging. The labs are in San Juan Capistrano and Valencia, California; Lewisville, Texas; Lenexa, Kansas; Chantilly, Virginia; and Marlborough, Massachusetts.
In its submission to the FDA, the company explained that "the method is needed to address availability of extraction supplies and increase testing capacity."
The company currently has the capacity to perform 135,000 COVID-19 molecular diagnostic tests a day. The new method is expected to add an additional 35,000 tests a day in overall capacity over the next several weeks. In addition, the company will be able to use specimen pooling with the new method to increase capacity even further.
Consequently, Quest now expects to have the capacity to perform 150,000 tests per day shortly and to continue to build additional capacity beyond that to 185,000 tests per day by Labor Day. Quest expects this will help it to achieve average turnaround times of 1 day for "Priority 1" patients and 2-3 days for all other patients in coming weeks.
The new extraction technique may be used with the Quest Diagnostics SARS-CoV-2 RNA, Qualitative Real Time RT-PCR (Quest SARS-CoV-2 rRT-PCR), a proprietary test developed and validated by Quest Diagnostics for use on respiratory specimens from individuals suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider.