In Marseille, the City and businesses are working together to more effectively fight the coronavirus epidemic. Specialized in the production of screening kits against infectious diseases, especially pulmonary, the biotechnology company C4Diagnostics was thus contacted by the local firefighters to develop means of detecting the virus in the environment. Invited Monday of La France bouge , on Europe 1, its president Younes Lazrak returns to this initiative.
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"The firefighters contacted us in mid-March to put in place as quickly as possible a solution that would make it possible to determine the presence of the virus in potentially strategic places, and on which there is a risk of contamination of personnel and the public. ", he explains to Raphaëlle Duchemin's microphone. And to continue: "It was therefore necessary very quickly to imagine and set up a test platform on surfaces such as door handles, switches, or in the ambient air".
The samples are taken by the Marine Firemen
Specializing in pulmonary diseases, C4Diagnostics had to adapt its production to develop this platform. "We were working on lung diseases such as legionellosis, which has symptoms similar to those of the coronavirus. But it is a bacterial disease, and adapting the technologies we have used so far would have taken us too long," confirms Younes Lazrak. "So we preferred to take other existing techniques, such as PCR testing technologies, which we adapted".
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C4Diagnostics wants to quadruple its daily testing capacity
The tests are carried out in two phases, a first sampling and another analysis. The samples, taken by the Firefighters, make it possible to collect surface samples, or aerial samples. For the surface samples, "we will pass a swab, which is a kind of large cotton swab, on a surface, and we will take 25 or 60cm2 on which we will try to harvest a maximum of virus", details Younes Lazrak . In the air, "we take a kind of cyclon, and we try to pass 600 liters of air per minute in a little liquid, to recover a maximum of particles". Once returned to the laboratories, the samples are then analyzed to detect the presence or absence of the virus.
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After these first weeks of work, C4Diagnostics intends to move up a gear, considerably increasing its testing capacity. "Until now, we had a nominal capacity of just over a hundred tests per day. As of this week, we are doubling our capacity to be 280 per day, and we are working to quadruple and move to 560 very quickly, "confirms Younes Lazrak.
Throughout France, researchers are mobilized to improve the detection of the coronavirus. To discover other examples, you can listen to La France bouge in full here: