Japanese industrial conglomerates Hitachi Ltd and Toshiba Corp, as well as Miraca Holdings subsidiary Fujirebio, said they will jointly set up a facility to produce antigen coronavirus testing kits.
The rare partnership would help double production of Fujirebio’s testing kits to 400,000 a week, the companies said. It would start operations by December in northern Hokkaido prefecture.
Antigen tests scan for proteins found on or inside a virus. They can detect the virus quickly but produce false negatives at a higher rate than the currently dominant polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
It takes about 30 minutes to get a result with Fujirebio’s palm-sized antigen test kit, compared with four to six hours for a PCR test.
