<Anchor>

To determine if a patient has corona19, a diagnostic reagent is required. Many of them depend on imports, and it has been confirmed that the foreign pharmaceutical companies supplying these reagents have not supplied to Korea recently. The emergency came as the authorities ran out of supplies to China.

This is reporter Kim Min-jung.

<Reporter>

Currently, Corona 19 takes two steps to extract a nucleic acid containing genetic information from a suspected patient's sample and amplify it for diagnosis.

At this point, a significant portion of the reagents used for nucleic acid extraction are dependent on imports.

However, it is reported that Roche, a multinational pharmaceutical company that has been supplying extraction reagents, has recently not supplied domestically.

Experts said, “Recently, China has requested Roche's urgent additional supply, and it is understood that the amount of diagnostic reagents that need to enter Korea has not been coming in for a few days.”

Sooner or later, not only the hospital bed, but also the lack of diagnostic reagents.

A key member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a call to SBS, "We are exploring the rush to use domestically available extraction reagents."

As domestic technology is already proven, we plan to verify the accuracy and stability quickly.

In infectious disease pandemic situations, a major dependency on multinational pharmaceuticals can create a crisis.

It is urgent to come up with measures to increase the domestic production of therapeutic drugs as well as diagnostic reagents.

(Video Editing: Park Player)