Meridian Bioscience, Cincinnati, Ohio, will increase production capacity of its SARS-CoV-2 molecular diagnostic test on its Revogene platform after receiving a $5.5M award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADxSM) initiative and an additional grant from JobsOhio.
The funding will help Meridian expand production of Revogene test kits in the Quebec City facility and build a new semiautomated, state-of-the-art, two-line production facility near the corporate headquarters in the Village of Newtown, near Cincinnati. The expansion will be completed in phases over the coming months and is expected to yield a maximum capacity of 800,000 Revogene tests per month by the end of 2021.
“We are excited to be in the final stages of bringing the Revogene SARS-CoV-2 assay to market,” says Tony Serafini-Lamanna, executive vice president of diagnostics. “Our customers continue to search for more tests to battle this wave of the coronavirus pandemic and this support from our federal, state and local governments will be instrumental in scaling our manufacturing capacity.”
NIH launched the RADxSM initiative to speed innovation in developing, commercializing, and implementing technologies for covid-19 testing. Meridian Bioscience is one of 27 projects that have moved to Phase 2, with a focus on scaling manufacturing to increase the capacity of testing in the United States.
During the launch of the RADxSM initiative in April 2020, NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, said, “Now is the time for that unmatched American ingenuity to bring the best and most innovative technologies forward to make testing for covid-19 widely available.”
JobsOhio and REDI Cincinnati are partnering with Meridian to support its growth on the Meridian Bioscience campus in Newtown, Ohio. Meridian received a JobsOhio Economic Development Grant as part of its commitment to create 45 new jobs and invest more than $7 million in Ohio. The Village of Newtown has also provided support to the project through tax abatements applied to the buildout of the newly leased facility.
For more information, visit Meridian Bioscience.
Featured image: Colorized scanning electron micrograph of a cell heavily infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (yellow), isolated from a patient sample. The black area in the image is extracellular space between the cells. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID.
