NEW YORK – Biomerica said Thursday that it has inked two separate licensing agreements with Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York for technologies related to a lab-based serological test for SARS-CoV-2.
The technologies, developed at Mount Sinai, are part of a test that uses the ELISA microplate format and can run on open-system equipment located in most US hospitals and clinical laboratories.
Biomerica said it intends to scale up manufacturing of the test, and it has the equipment and capacity to manufacture more than 1 million tests per month at its manufacturing facility in Irvine, California. The price of the test is expected to be about $10 per patient.
The company said that commercial sales of the test may be possible within weeks if is successful, but processes associated with technology transfer and scaling up can make timing uncertain.
ELISA-based serology tests detect antibodies in patients' blood, including those infected with SARS-CoV-2. Antibodies emerge in detectable quantities about eight days after infection, and remain detectable for three months, or more, Biomerica said.
Serology tests are expected to be powerful tools in the current pandemic, including for identifying people with or without symptoms who have been infected, the firm said.