Building on BGI’s history of developing solutions for rapid pathogen detection, BGI has successfully developed a Real-Time Fluorescent RT-PCR kit for detecting 2019-nCoV, which can issue results in a few hours. The kits have already been issued to many hospitals and disease control centers.

BGI has been working with relevant Chinese authorities including the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, through which the kits have been issued to various hospitals and local disease control centers. BGI is also engaged with relevant organizations in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the Brunei Ministry of Health, the Thailand ministry of public health, the National Medical Research Center of Nigeria (NIMR), the National Institute of Infectious Diseases of the National Health Laboratory of South Africa (NICD), to supply the test kits and offer additional pathogen detection solutions using next generation sequencing technology. Further, a large number of kits are being urgently sent around the world to cope with the mass migration of people during the Chinese New Year.

The development of the 2019-nCoV detection kit builds upon BGI’s previous experience developing rapid diagnostic solutions for pathogen detection. For example, in April 2003, BGI successfully sequenced the SARS virus in less than 20 hours, and developed an enzyme immunoassay test kit in 96 hours. In 2011, BGI successfully developed a diagnostic kit for the Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) epidemic that broke out in Germany. All scientific data and information was made available to the international community, laying an important scientific foundation to control the epidemic.