COVID-19 ECHO Session #49: Manufacturers of COVID-19 Diagnostics: Siemens & Thermo Fisher


September 17, 2021

On 16 September 2021, ASLM’s LabCoP hosted another session in our series on manufacturers of COVID-19 diagnostics products. This session featured Siemens Healthineers and Thermo Fisher Scientific. The session focussed on innovations in SARS-CoV-2 to handle detection and surveillance of the fast-emerging variants of concern (VOC) and variants of interest (VOI) that have implications on viral transmission, disease severity, and possible evasion of vaccine-induced immunity. Ongoing global molecular surveillance is critical to quickly identifying SARS-CoV-2 VOC/VOI and can be facilitated by the detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in clinical diagnostics and research settings. In this session, presentations were made by Dr Said AL-Dhaihry, Clinical Virologist, Siemens Healthineers; Tshego Mothatinyane, Product and Technical Sales Specialist, Genetic Testing Solutions – Africa, Thermo Fisher Scientific; and Daniel Mutua, Product and Technical Sales Specialist, Genetic Testing Solutions – Africa Thermo Fisher Scientific. They shared advantages and performance of detecting SNPs for SARS-CoV-2 molecular surveillance, the methodology for qPCR-based SARS-CoV-2 variants’ verifications and data interpretation, the status of regulatory approval, and requirements/consumables to operate the test and consideration for the deployment of these technologies to support COVID-19 molecular diagnosis and surveillance. Please follow the links to view the recording and download slides for your further reference.