SlovakAid, a humanitarian relief program from the Slovak Republic sent a plane from Bratislava on Sunday carrying COVID-19 supplies include 50,000 diagnostic tests, one PCR thermocycler device to perform the tests and 20,000 FFP2 respirators, which arrived in Nairobi on Monday morning.
ESET supported the development of the kit, which was approved by the Slovak Republic’s State Institute for Drug Control (ŠUKL) on May 14, 2020, and registered in EUDAMED on May 26, 2020, for distribution in Europe as a CE-marked in vitro diagnostic test. The kit, called vDetect COVID-19 RT-qPCR, was developed through the collaborative research of scientists from the Slovak company MultiplexDX, the Biomedical Research Center of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Comenius University Science Park in Bratislava, and experts from Lambda Life and ProScience Tech.
“As one of the key contributors in making the COVID-19 diagnostic kit a reality, ESET is happy to see that countries in need of assistance, such as Kenya, are also able to benefit from our efforts. We are ready to provide assistance for similar undertakings in the future,” said Palo Luka, Chief Operating Officer of ESET.
Pavol Čekan, founder of MultiplexDX, commented, “We rapidly developed a new PCR test for COVID-19 that can reliably help diagnose early-stage patients. Having provided enough test kits to address the needs of Slovak laboratories, we turned our efforts to stepping up production for other countries, such as Kenya, that could benefit from our products.”
With the assistance of State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic Ingrid Brocková and State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic Ján Lazar, the relief supplies were presented to a representative of the Embassy of the Republic of Kenya in Austria on Friday, July 24.