Omega to manufacture Covid-19 tests for UK government

Medical diagnostics company Omega Diagnostics has agreed a contract with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), it announced on Thursday, to provide manufacturing capacity for Covid-19 lateral flow antigen tests as part of the UK Government's target of producing two million lateral flow tests per day.

The AIM-traded firm said the intention was that as soon as the DHSC had access to a test that has successfully passed a performance evaluation, the test would be licensed for Omega to manufacture.

As part of the contract, DHSC would loan a number of key pieces of manufacturing equipment.

That, the board said, would facilitate the necessary expansion in production capability in the company’s Alva-based facility, to ensure the tests were made available as soon as possible.

The company said it expected that would provide it with the capacity to produce about two million tests per week by the end of April, when combining the government-loaned equipment with its own.

Omega said it expected that capacity to be sufficient to meet the expected demand for lateral flow Covid-19 antigen tests, with enough remaining capacity to be used for ‘Visitect’ CD4 or Covid-19 antibody tests, according to demand.

“We are delighted to formalise our relationship with the UK Government and to utilise our lateral flow test production capacity to support the Covid-19 mass testing programme being rolled out across this country,” said chief executive officer Colin King.

“I appreciate that trading in our core business has been softer than expected for the current financial year, however the on-going opportunity for growth in CD4 testing and food intolerance revenues is unchanged.

“The new financial year will see this growth opportunity realised, and will also see the full impact of Covid-19 antigen testing, and so we are likely to deliver substantial revenue growth compared to this financial year which ends next month.”

At 1230 GMT, shares in Omega Diagnostics were up 2.69% at 95.5p.