Innovation Pharmaceuticals Inc (IPIX)

[capital gain]

looks like it is for a test, not a treatment.

The NIH is also trying to fix another problem: the need for better, faster Covid-19 tests, through a $1.5 billion effort called the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics or RADx initiative,which Collins and his colleagues described in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

Current testing technology based on the polymerase chain reaction “doesn’t seem to work very well in terms of handling the demand when the demand starts going up higher and higher,” Collins said. RADx has settled on a “Shark Tank”-like format where small startups audition technologies to receive NIH support. Applications have come from 600 efforts, of which 27 have entered the shark tank stage; one is getting ready to begin efforts aimed at manufacturing scale up and clinical validation. Most of these efforts, Collins said, are point-of-care tests.