Antigen test kits ready for rollout

MANILA, Philippines — LabX Corp., the local distributor of Lansion antigen test kits, on Tuesday said the firm was ready to help boost the government’s daily testing capacity in Metro Manila and its surrounding provinces.

Certified by Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM), Lansion antigen fluorescence test kits were recently approved for rollout by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Vivencio Dizon had said the average daily 50,000 RT-PCR tests would be augmented by 30,000 antigen tests to detect, trace and isolate more COVID-19 patients.

He said the task force had authorized the Office of Civil Defense to procure 500,000 sets of antigen test kits.

So far, only three antigen brands meet government standards. These are Abbott’s Panbio, SD Biosensor and Lansion fluorescence antigen test, Dizon said. Based on RITM’s findings, Lansion’s COVID-19 antigen test kit has an average sensitivity of 91.43 percent and specificity of 97.54 percent, the highest among locally available antigen tests kits.