Local conglomerate Vingroup has successfully reached a deal with Singaporean firm Breathonix to bring to Vietnam a COVID-19 breath testing system costing over 460 billion VND (20 million USD).
Hanoi (VNA) – Local conglomerate Vingroup has successfully reached a deal with Singaporean firm Breathonix to bring to Vietnam a COVID-19 breath testing system costing over 460 billion VND (20 million USD).
Comprising 30 testing machines and disposable mouthpieces capable of collecting 2 million samples, the system will be handed over to the Ministry of Health (MoH) upon its arrival in the country.
The BreFence™ Go COVID-19 breath testing system quickly produces results in an accurate and non-invasive manner. The test has received provisional authorisation from Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority (HSA).
It operates by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in a person’s exhaled breath that are produced by biochemical reactions in human cells.
A person need only blow into a disposable one-way valve mouthpiece connected to a high-precision breath sampler. The exhaled breath is collected and fed into a cutting-edge mass spectrometer for measurement.
A proprietary software algorithm analyses the VOCs biomarkers and generates results in less than a minute, with an accuracy rate of 90 percent.
Vingroup has to date contributed close to 2.29 trillion VND to the country’s COVID-19 fight.
Of particular note, it presented 4 million doses of vaccine costing nearly 500 billion VND to the MoH, and provided 20 billion VND for clinical trials of the homegrown candidate vaccine COVIVAC, which is being developed by the ministry’s Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals (IVAC). The group also donated medical supplies worth 30 billion VND to help Bac Giang and Bac Ninh provinces cope with spreading COVID-19 outbreaks./.