The Health Service Executive and the National Virus Reference Laboratory UCD have secured to a contract to obtain enough reagent to carry out 900,000 Covid-19 tests.
Genomics Medicine Ireland Limited (GMI) is supplying the test kits, and the components for the first 200,000 have already been delivered to its laboratory in Cherrywood, Dublin.
It says the laboratory will operate seven days a week to formulate the reagents for the NVRL and its partner laboratories, who are the primary testing centres for Covid-19.
It says this will enable the NVRL to ramp up to 10,000 tests per day in the coming weeks supporting a more rapid analysis of samples and a quicker turn-around of test results to clinicians.