The U.K. government is launching a national research program, in collaboration with a number of universities, National Health Service (NHS) trusts and medical research groups, to evaluate the accuracy of new coronavirus diagnostic tests and how well they perform in different settings.

The COVID-19 National DiagnOstic Research and Evaluation Platform, or CONDOR, will be funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), U.K. Research and Innovation, Asthma U.K. and the British Lung Foundation.

“Right now, there’s a critical gap in how we road-test new diagnostics for COVID-19,” said the project’s co-primary investigator, Gail Hayward, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and deputy director of the NIHR’s Community Healthcare MedTech and IVD Co-operative.

“While a new diagnostic test might work well in a lab under controlled conditions, there are many different factors that could make it less accurate when you take that test out of the lab and into the real world,” Hayward added. “By robustly evaluating these diagnostics in health and care settings, the CONDOR programme will help the government and clinicians to understand the real-world accuracy of these tests in patients presenting with COVID-19 symptoms in the NHS.”

Source: www.fiercebiotech.com