Zenith Fights the Battle of Covid on Multiple Fronts
At Zenith Adhesive Components we have been committed to doing our part to help control and mitigate the outbreak of covid-19 in Ireland and abroad. Along with a few key customers in particular, we have been working tirelessly at Zenith to deliver the fastest response to their very varied needs.
Having started at the very beginning by making visors for the HSE and the N.I. NHS we quickly moved onto much more complex products, all medical grade and made in our state of the art cleanroom.
A current concern with Covid is variants of the virus that are starting to emerge. One of the key battles in defeating the pandemic is to identify the source of these viral variants. Our work at Zenith with a long-standing customer whose DNA analytical technology was quickly adapted during 2020 is now helping monitor these variants and to track them across health services in several countries in real-time. We make roughly 30 different sub-components for the highly advanced test machinery and consumables used for this task. Our products in this application include seals and gaskets mainly but also some interesting absorbent foams and masking products used to control the liquid flow in the samples being tested.
Another area we recently started making something new, but for an old customer now involved in Covid testing, is in very specialised lidding tapes for microtiter trays. Microtiter trays are small plates with 96 tiny test tubes that are typically used in analytical research and clinical diagnostic testing laboratories. The use of these special lids and trays will enable the analysis of multiple samples of covid-19 allowing further research about the virus to be conducted at a more rapid pace. This conjunctively leads to more covid results per day and better overall observing of the day to day patterns, in essence allowing our country and many more to determine the need for lockdowns and the severity of them with the right information in hand.
Since last Summer, we have been working with a new customer on four key components for a newly designed and now high volume manufactured testing kit.
This kit allows for a Covid test result in 90 minutes for someone who has possibly contracted the virus. It is a rapid, portable, and lab free RT-PCR test which has been authorized by the MHRA for clinical use and has obtained its CE mark. This testing kit has at least a 95% success rate with a 100% specificity rate which means it only picks up the Covid-19 virus. This level of accuracy and speed is of major benefit to the many clinicians now using this system all over the world. Our components in this device are for sealing the liquid samples in place but we also manufacture a membrane that filters the swab sample to isolate the key elements for testing.
All in all, we have been very busy since the start of this pandemic and 2021 looks like it will be even busier than 2020. With the great work of our customers and their clients, we very much enjoy being part of the solution to “putting this virus in our rear-view mirror”.
Stay safe.
April 2021