A medical diagnostics company is set to open its $50 million manufacturing facility in Richlands. The new Ellume site at 19 Macgregor Place will focus on producing 15 million tests a month for COVID-19, flu and tuberculosis.
About 450 jobs will need to be filled, including assembling testing kits, before the facility open in the middle of October. These testing kits will be for export to the United States.
Ellume currently has 100 staff at its main site in East Brisbane. Founder Dr Sean Parsons said that they have been developing and improving their world-class technology “to meet global demands” since the swine flu epidemic in 2009.
Dr Parsons said that the company convinced its American partners that setting up a facility in southeast Queensland was more viable than a manufacturing site in the U.S.
Richlands is close to arterial corridors and connections in airports in Wellcamp and Brisbane. With many local skilled workers, Dr Parsons said that southeast Queensland could become the leading business site when it comes to COVID-19 test productions.
The company developed an Access Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Test, which runs on a portable digital device called Access eHub. This diagnostic tool that promises results in less than 15 minutes or three minutes for strong positive cases.
Access eHub could handle eight samples and process at least 30 samples within an hour, allowing laboratories to run independent tests more efficiently.
“The Access eHub platform offers a new combination of speed and scale that marks an important step towards decentralised mass testing that health authorities all over the world have been urgently seeking,” Dr Parsons said.