Agena Bioscience, has unveiled their MassARRAY® SARS-CoV-2 Variant Panel for Research Use Only (RUO) for the detection of key SARS-CoV-2 virus strains, including the UK (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), Brazil (P.1) and Denmark (Cluster 5) variants.

Clinical laboratories can process thousands of samples each day on a single MassARRAY instrument. This makes the new panel one of the highest throughput SARS-CoV-2 variant surveillance tests on the market, and at $25 per sample, a compelling alternative to more costly and complex sequencing technologies.

“Most surveillance methods rely on sequencing-based technologies, which have inherent limitations – cost, time-to-result, limit of detection, and high-complexity – that make them impractical for known variant screening,” said Dr. Darryl Irwin, Vice President of Scientific Affairs. “A more effective approach is to divide testing between the MassARRAY System for monitoring existing, known variants and sequencing to discover new variants. This will allow for a more scalable and effective expansion of variant surveillance programs, while increasing the efficiency of sequencing-based new variant discovery.”

Peter Dansky, CEO of Agena Bioscience, said: “The MassARRAY System is already being used daily to test tens of thousands of samples for COVID-19 under Emergency Use Authorization from the US FDA, and it is ideally suited to rapidly screen millions of COVID-positive samples for the known SARS-CoV-2 strains, at a low cost.”