The Spanish serological tests of the CSIC will be produced in South Africa to reach developing countries
The COVID-19 serological tests developed by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) will be produced in South Africa by the Biotech company thanks to an agreement sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) to make it easier for medicines to reach developing countries.
The CSIC designs an antibody test for COVID-19 that is more sensitive and 99% reliable
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The agreement has been possible thanks to the collaboration of the CSIC and the Medicine Patent Pool (MPP) platform, created by the United Nations to make it easier for medicines to combat COVID-19 to reach the poorest countries.
These serological tests They came onto the market in Spain in the fall of 2020, produced by the Spanish company Immunostep, and allow to detect with close to 100% reliability if a person has antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, and if these antibodies come from the vaccine, or are a consequence of having been in contact with the virus.
The CSIC is the first research organization in the world to offer a global open access license for a health tool related to COVID-19, this organization stressed in a press release distributed to the media on Monday.
Last November, it already announced the signing of the license agreement, which is part of the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) initiative, created by the WHO in May 2020 to facilitate "timely, equal and affordable" access ” to COVID-19 medical devices.
"This is the last stage of a long project in which the CSIC's Deputy Vice-Presidency for Knowledge Transfer has been working since the start of the pandemic so that one of its COVID-19 technologies reaches all the countries that need it," he said. underlined Javier Maira, responsible for Commercial Strategy of the CSIC.
"The tests were protected by patent, taking advantage of the fact that they used an unexposed protein of the virus, the protease, which had never been used in diagnosis," Maira specified, detailing that it was later shown that the use of this protein implied advantages important in the usefulness of the tests, since they identified whether the antibodies created by the immune system came from an infection of the virus itself or from vaccines.
