Company announces home diagnostic kit for coronavirus

Hod Hasharon-based BATM Advanced Communications Limited announced that they have developed a new diagnostic kit to detect the novel coronavirus and that the idea of creating a home test is under discussion.

According to The Jerusalem Post, HodHasharon-based BATM Advanced Communications Limited announced that they have developed a new diagnostic kit to detect the novel coronavirus.

As the CEO of the company Dr. Zvi Marom explained to The Jerusalem Post, compared to the kit that is currently used by hospitals all over the world, the product conceived by BATM has the advantage of being faster and more accurate and, within a few weeks, the company aims to set the cost at approximately NIS 1 per test. The kit is expected to be CE approved next week.

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Infectious diseases are among the leading causes of human death in the world. When COVID-19 (COronaVIrus Disease 2019) recently emerged as a threat to human health, BATM already had several years of experience in the field, which allowed it to rapidly employ its research and technology to tackle the new challenge, Marom pointed out.

“We are a very well-known entity within the field of infectious diseases,” he told the Post. “In the past several years, people have been paying more attention to different kinds of illnesses, such as cancer for example, forgetting the damage that infectious diseases cause. We decided to focus on the diagnostic of pathogens, which means viruses, microbes, fungi etc., which are still the most fatal killers on the face of the earth.”

For the past nine years, BATM has been working with leading research institutions in several countries to develop an innovative diagnostic device to identify any kind of pathogen in less than half an hour.

“We built a machine that looks like a shoe box in which cartridges containing between 100 and 200 pathogens are inserted according to the suspected disease: we have created a hospital admission cartridge, a respiratory cartridge, a meningitis cartridge, and so on,” Marom explained.

The system is currently being tested in hospitals.

“We believe that this will mark a very big change in how people are diagnosed and treated for infectious diseases,” he pointed out.

It was in this scenario that the coronavirus emergency arose.

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“We got reports about the virus from our Chinese colleagues very early on and started to monitor the situation, even receiving from them the sequence of the virus. We understood immediately that we were looking at a cousin of the SARS and the MERS diseases and we began to prepare,” he told the Post.

The Jerusalem Post