EQS-News

Achiko AG looks back at pivotal year and reaffirms commitment to provide affordable and accurate Covid-19 testing solution - Seite 2

"We believe the pandemic is likely to continue to surprise throughout 2022, as seen with Omicron and how this variant is affecting pandemic management efforts even in countries with high vaccination rates plus boosters," stated Steven Goh, CEO of Achiko. "The threat is clearly more evident in low- and middle-income countries, where vaccine inequality and vaccine hesitancy is greater."

Unlike other rapid testing formats which rely on an antigen responding to the N1 protein, AptameX uses a DNA aptamer, a synthetic strand of DNA, to respond to the non-mutating part of the S1 protein. Results received during in-vitro trials in Spain and Indonesia indicated a greater sensitivity even at low viral loads. At a high industry CT score of 28.3, AptameX delivered a sensitivity of 77%. As the Company has proceeded to commercialisation, subsequent work indicates that the sensitivity numbers improve against lower CT scores. Furthermore, as the system uses software to evaluate the results the additional data allows us to train the system and improve specificity. These results compare favourably to other rapid tests which, whilst often reporting high sensitivity and specificity numbers, are typically at CT values under 25. However, at the higher CT values around 28 where Covid-19 is known to spread, sensitivity often falls to around 10% or less.

As the year proceeded, the Company chose to focus development and commercialisation efforts in Indonesia due to the Company's existing investments in the country. In August, the Company successfully achieved emergency use approval and then for its second generation product, full product registration approval for five years by Indonesia's Ministry of Health.

Production has commenced and been streamlined to Taiwan and Indonesia with key precision materials and instrumentation made in Taiwan, and mass market assembly, plastics, and packaging in Indonesia. The Company envisages that the costs per test kit may be around USD$0.60 initially and fall substantially as the Company scales production. With sufficient notice, capacity in Taiwan may scale to up to several hundred million tests per month, and the local partners in Indonesia have similar experience with that level of scale within the country. When the Company replicates production to other countries, costs may change depending on local manufacturing, assembly, and distribution costs.