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Further information from a German paper: - Roche has been working on this already for weeks with high priority. - These are tests that run on high-throughput
by deng 7y ago
Further information from a German paper:
- Roche has been working on this already for weeks with high priority.
- These are tests that run on high-throughput machines, namely the Roche Cobas 6800/8800 systems:
https://www.dialog.roche.com/pk/en_us/products_and_solutions/molecular-lab/cobas-6800-8800-systems.html https://www.dialog.roche.com/pk/en_us/products_and_solutions...
- One Cobas 8800 is able to perform 4100 tests per day in a fully automatic fashion.
- There are roughly 800 Cobas 6800/8800 in Europe, US and Asia combined.
- One test costs about 15 CHF (which is roughly 15 USD) (EDIT: This is what Roche gets per test. The overall laboratory cost is probably much more expensive).
- Roche is pretty much the only manufacturer for machines like these.
Source (German):
https://www.faz.net/2.1690/pharmakonzern-roche-neuer-schnelltest-fuer-coronavirus-16678244.html https://www.faz.net/2.1690/pharmakonzern-roche-neuer-schnell...
EDIT: More exact numbers in the linked article: Cobas 6800 can do 1440 tests/day, Cobas 8800 4128 tests/day.
- neom 7y agoThe cobas 8000 is huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aht-L4BMyN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aht-L4BMyN4
- deng 7y agoYes, these machines are insane. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-jaC3_d3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-jaC3_d3o The dramatic trailer music is quite adequate, IMHO.
- ape4 7y agoLike something from Star Trek
- atomi 7y agoGlorious. :)
- jacquesm 7y agoThat is a very well produced video, it doesn't contain a single spoken word and yet it tells the story perfectly. Incredible machinery. Any idea what these cost?
- alextheparrot 7y agoLooks like around 400k base [0], but a full system with service appears like it would run over a million in a year or two [0] https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/V797P7347A/0UZLK9.3QPYM1_V797P-7347A_V797P7347A.PDF https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/V797P7347A/0UZLK9.3QPY... , page 13
- deng 7y agoThis is actually surprisingly cheap. My guess is the real margin is in the tests itself, which you must buy from Roche as well.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat is amazingly cheap, I expected an order of magnitude more.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nkrumm 7y agoThe video above (at least one of them) was showing an entire automation line built on Roche technology-- easily an order of magnitude more than 400k. The Cobas 8800 is just a component of that entire line.
- jacquesm 7y agoAh ok, that makes more sense. I figured a 100K or so per unit would be cheap the way it has been engineered. That's a whole robotic laboratory and what with the normal price of cleanroom equipment it would be ridiculously cheap if that setup was a few hundred K.
- ablekh 7y agoImpressive video and soundtrack, indeed. One thing that I don't fully understand, though, is how relevant lab results might be accurate, when, during part of the processing workflow, containers appear to be open to the processing chamber and its atmosphere, thereby presumably being exposed to potential cross-contamination. I'm likely missing something trivial, so I'm curious about what it might be.
- m4rtink 7y agoI guess it might be flushed by cleaned air or nitrogen ? But good point about cross contamination, still could be there is a mechanism to counter that, like some vapour pressure tricks or gas streams preventing fumes from one open container reaching another.
- ablekh 7y agoThank you for your feedback. Perhaps, you're right. Let's see whether other people can shed some additional light on this.
- joezydeco 7y agoI worked on the ancestor to these machines over at Abbott. There’s nothing in whole blood or serum that will spontaneously aerosolize and get into the air. The tests are detecting levels of antigens, antibodies, or DNA in the sample. The samples are manipulated with disposable parts to prevent crossover.
- ablekh 7y agoUnderstood. Thank you very much for your clarifications.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoGiven the throughout, it’s actually quite amazing!
- barkingcat 7y agoThat is not huge - in fact that looks like there's an incredible amount of miniaturization already put into that product. Technology is great. Before this product it would probably take an entire university campus with multiple labs full of technicians to do the number of tests this is doing.
- eddieh 7y agoAm I missing something? The Roche website says Designed to provide a fully integrated real-time PCR workflow, the cobas® 8800 system can run up to 960 tests in an eight-hour shift with minimal user interactions and up to four hours of walk-away time per run when running at maximum capacity. (24 / 8) * 960 = 2,880 per day Update: formatting
- mlyle 7y agoIt looks like that the 960 number is predicated upon a start time from "idle", and minimal interactions. The actual slope rate of test completion looks like it's 192/hour. If that throughput can be maintained with more frequent interaction to keep the machine fed, it'd be 4.6k/day. https://www.dialog.roche.com/content/dam/dialog/owp/apac/Media/Molecular/cobas-8800-performance.png https://www.dialog.roche.com/content/dam/dialog/owp/apac/Med... That is, it takes time to "stuff the pipeline". The cited number -- 4128 -- appears to be 21.5 * 192.
- maxerickson 7y agoI think the sample handling part is faster than the PCR part, but you might have more than 1 PCR part setup on the machine. So if that is true, it isn't labs multiplied by the PCR rate to get to a testing rate, it's the sum of the bottlenecks of the installations.
- fblp 7y agoHow many machines are in the US?
- adventured 7y agoThere are 110 in the US (of either type; most are likely the 6800), and Roche says they've installed a "significant" number in the US in the last few weeks (who knows what that means). https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/other/487393-fda-grants-emergency-approval-for-faster-coronavirus-test https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/other/487393-fda-grant...
- x0x0 7y agoThese are hardly the only machines that can run rtPCR though; they're just highly automated. eg biorad makes and sells tons of (much simpler), typically 96-well rtPCR machines. You can find them on ebay for like $5k. Training people to use them is not particularly hard, and you can probably do 4-8 runs / day on one of them. NB: 96 will means you probably can process 88-92 samples per run plus 4-8 controls. The limiting factor is approved tests and reagents, laboratory bench time to prep samples, and a distribution mechanism to get test kits to to people and then to labs.
- ksk 7y agoWho is going to supply you the primer for that kind of volume? :)
- inferiorhuman 7y agoRoche ramped up production in anticipation of approval, so hopefully they can.
- mlyle 7y ago> Roche is pretty much the only manufacturer for machines like these. Though Roche makes the only huge machines like this, there's lots of high-automation rtPCR out there. And you can fit a lot of e.g. Abbott m2000's in the floor space that one Cobas 6800 takes, picking up some flexibility and each doing ~500 a day.
- yourapostasy 7y agoResearching the automated MDx market, I found out the Cobas 8800 (and indeed, pretty much all automated MDx solutions) only works with Roche-manufactured proprietary panels, or results are only valid with proprietary panels. BD lets you run user-originated panels, but you can mix them with FDA-approved panels. I can't just take some master mix from someone else and generate a valid result on a Cobas 8800, as far as I can tell. Would appreciate any clarification/correction on this, though. What is Roche's manufacturing capacity for these panels each week for the US in the next four weeks? With the 110 machine figure someone else reported in this thread, there is a theoretical limit of about 451K Roche tests per day assuming we shove aside all other testing on this gear, but we could be supply-constrained by these proprietary panels instead. In which case we really should get BD MAX, Seegene All-In-One Platform and similar S. Korean solutions' approvals from the FDA specifically for their Covid-19 panels for their systems on an national emergency basis.
- ampdepolymerase 7y agoConsidering this is HN, there is enough engineering brainpower to build open source clones of this. Biology is not the same as electronics, it is closer to software in the sense that a lot of things can be easily (for some definition of easy) cloned once you figure out how it works. The only difference is that biology is slow and expensive and takes a lot of equipment. Caveats: getting to Roche level of throughput and scale would be tricky with just Arduinos and off the shelf stuff and there are some magic numbers that you will have to figure out through experimentation. Building a usable machine just for a small number of people is not that tricky if you have e.g. 5 bio and 5 CS/EE people working on getting a design shipped.
- deng 7y agoI think you greatly underestimate how complicated these machines are. For instance, I just cannot imagine how these machines keep themselves so clean. My guess is "lots of disposables" but still, that must take years to get right. Just read "Bad Blood" to see how Theranos struggled with the machines not simply becoming a bloody mess, and they had some great engineers on the team.
- dv_dt 7y agoThis South Korean manufacturer seems to able to do 94 tests at a time in four hours with their machine. Which might be a nicer batch number for testing closer to the point of care. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-testing-intl-hnk/ https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-...
- gniv 7y agoI think this is similar to what everybody else is doing -- using a thermocycler to run PCR. It can run 96 samples in parallel and takes 3-4 hours to run through 30-40 cycles. But there are a lot of manual steps, and I'm not sure how much the SK company automates them.
- ksk 7y ago>I think this is similar to what everybody else is doing -- using a thermocycler to run PCR What method do you propose without a thermocycler?
- dv_dt 7y agoThe article talks about a robot arm pipetting and implies the machine finishes the test, but I don't know what other steps there might be.
- m0zg 7y agoThis can't be the only option for testing. Korea has tested hundreds of thousands of people so far. By far the largest number of any country, including China. Such high throughput does not seem achievable with these machines unless you already have a ton of them, and all the reagents are stockpiled. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/ Everyone else seems fairly low throughput, with the US being on the "ridiculously low" end of that spectrum if you consider tests per million of population.
- deng 7y agoSK does 10.000 tests per day with test kits which they could quickly produce but which involve a lot of manual steps and hence man power. You could replace all that with 2.5 of these huge Roche machines. So for really high throughput you absolutely need those huge machines, everything else simply does not scale. Of course you need a stockpile of reagents, but manual test kits need these as well and AFAIK those are fairly standard.
- js2 7y agoThat's much more impressive than the machine the CDC approved test was developed for: http://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/4406985 http://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/4406985 (Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast DX Real-Time PCR Instrument with SDS 1.4 software.) I'll bet the Roche doesn't require a PC running Windows software that still needs manual defragging: > When to Clean Up and Defragment the Hard Drive > • At least once every month > • When a message is displayed by the Windows operating system instructing you to defragment https://assets.thermofisher.com/TFS-Assets/LSG/manuals/4406991.PDF https://assets.thermofisher.com/TFS-Assets/LSG/manuals/44069... (Page 47)
- burnte 7y agoI've done IT for labs. The PCs these insanely expensive machines are hoked to make me absolutely sick with how they have to be set up. You have a testing machine, be it a mass spec, PCR, whatever, costing 6 and 7 figures with a $500 PC that has every imaginable security hole and updates turned off. Drives me bonkers.
- leemailll 7y agoPcr machines definitely not in 6 figures, unless they are enormous in sample numbers
- burnte 7y agoI'm no tlimiting my statement to just PCRs, I'm saying all the crazy expensive lab machines that can be that expensive.
- srcmap 7y agoThat PC is only for controlling this machine and no need to be on internet, right? If so, just config the windows firewall to disconnect it from the internet? I do that on my home machines. All updates are disable and I manually enable them every 6-12 months to let win10 to go crazy for a day or so and everything is up to day. One can also monitor the podcast such as "Security Now" to check if the latest windows update processes have any special BSOD or silently / randomly delete all users files/profiles before turn on the update.