Flexible Production Makes Roche's HIV Test Innovation a Success

摘要

Close to 38 million people in the world were living with HIV-the virus that causes AIDS-by the end of 2018, and some 8 million of those people did not know they were living with the virus, according to UN-AIDS. Roche, a leader in personalized medicine, aims to help curb the public health threat through improved examination and monitoring of HIV patients. The company has developed a novel test device to make this possible. In turn, that breakthrough was made possible through advances in production technologies from Beckhoff Automation At its site in Mannheim, Germany, Roche developed a new plasma separation card (PSC) that not only requires just a small amount of blood from a patient's fingertip, but it also greatly simplifies sample transport. For the first time, blood plasma samples no longer need to be cooled during transport to the laboratory. This is particularly important given that more than two-thirds of the people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.