About Us
The Covid Apollo Project brings together leading life sciences investment funds with diagnostics expertise to identify, scale up, and bring to market affordable Covid-19 testing solutions at a pandemic scale.
Where We Are/Where We Need To Be
Until there’s a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine deployed globally, we need frequent testing to allow for safe return to work and school. But today’s testing solutions are either inadequate, expensive, or at insufficient scale. In the US alone, researchers estimate that 20 million Covid tests per day would be needed to remobilize the economy. Right now, we’re testing roughly 800,000 Americans per day – an effort focused on symptomatic patients and therefore catching only a fraction of what’s needed to control the spread of Covid.
Toward sustainable testing solutions
Relying on our current and creaky Covid diagnostic infrastructure to reach 20 million people every day is as impossible as it is impractical.
We lack the capacity, and testing remains too expensive: insurers bill $100 for each person tested. If we could expand the current system to test the 20 million people per day we need, it would cost $2 billion each and every day. Such spending would cripple state Medicaid programs and other payers. Meanwhile, Americans must sometimes wait hours for a test and days or even weeks for the results, rendering those results useless at best and dangerous at worst.
Remedying this will take not just one test, but an intelligently integrated set of tests. We believe these tests must work together to:
1. Quickly and very inexpensively (even if not accurately) screen for who could be infected, and, of those,
2. Determine quickly and accurately (even if not inexpensively) who actually is infected,
3. Inexpensively and accurately (even if not quickly) identify who was infected in the past and, of those
4. Determine inexpensively who currently is immune to serious infection.