NIH awards contracts for COVID-19 rapid point-of-care tests

The National Institutes of Health last week announced as part of its Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative $129.3 million in contracts to nine companies for technologies that include portable point-of-care tests for immediate results and high-throughput laboratories that can return results within 24 hours.

Among the tests are some that use RT-PCR and a device that can give results in 15 minutes and strips that can be read without specialized equipment, similar to pregnancy tests.

In addition, NIH said it is adding five additional laboratories to expand the network of coverage and potentially manage tens of thousands of additional tests daily.