A Brisbane-based company that has targeted the premium end of the COVID home diagnosis boom has officially opened its 20,000-square-metre facility in the US, but its founder is now nervous about a potential flu pandemic as “vaccine weariness” sets in.
Ellume founder and CEO Sean Parsons tells Business News Australia the opening of the facility in Frederick, Maryland moves “moves us into pretty rarefied air” of companies that have massive capability for manufacturing tests for COVID and other viruses, at around 500,000 per day.
With its fluorescent detection technology originally made for treating diseases like influenza and tuberculosis, Ellume swiftly applied its technological expertise as the pandemic broke out and developed the first over-the-counter (OTC) rapid antigen test to receive emergency use authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) then backed Ellume with $40 million to scale up production from Ellume’s 4,400sqm Brisbane facility, and a few months later this was followed up by a $304 million agreement with the US Department of Defense (DOD) to develop the premises that have just launched.
Parsons says Ellume will be delivering on the DOD deal through the 2022 calendar year.
“It’s [the contract] still got a bit of a ways to run yet – we expect that to be mostly completed this year, and we’re working that all out with the Department of Defense,” says Parsons, who was also the Brisbane Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2020.
“We certainly want to be continuing to sell product in the major pharmacy chains and pharmacy channels in the US. We also very much want to be partnered with the US Government to be able to respond to this pandemic and future pandemics, so for us it’s really a dual-use capability.
“We’re certainly the premium product in the category, that’s for sure, and we’ve got a different value proposition than some of the others that are out there. But even with the additional manufacturing capability, we don’t have enough to supply everyone.”
This means that despite the significant increase in capacity from the US, there is still ample demand for product exported from Ellume’s Brisbane operations as well.
“Certainly consumers understand the need for home testing much more than they did beforehand, and that the majority of diagnoses happening in America now are actually home tests, so we’re seeing this incredible flourishing of home diagnostics in the US which has been nothing short of amazing,” he explains.
“We are still shipping product from here in Australia to the US. There’s still lots of manufacturing for the US that will be happening here from Australia.
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