This article has been updated to include additional information about the size of Ginkgo Bioworks' award from the NIH.
NEW YORK – The National Institutes of Health said on Friday that it is awarding a total of $248.7 million in contracts to seven biomedical diagnostic companies under its Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative, to support a range of new lab-based and point-of-care tests for the detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.