Somagen Launches COVID-19 Variant Analysis Service..."Existing Analysis Services Diagnosing Around the Clock"

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunseok Yoo] Somagen, a U.S. bio company and the first foreign company to be listed through a technology special listing, announced on the 14th that it has officially launched a COVID-19 variant analysis service using next-generation sequencing (NGS) after signing a business agreement with U.S. company Swift Biosciences last month.

Swift is a company specializing in the development and manufacturing of sequencing library kits for research purposes. It is a subsidiary of Integrated DNA Technologies (“IDT”), a global leader in custom nucleic acid synthesis.

Somagen plans to provide the COVID-19 variant analysis service developed by Swift to the North American market. According to the company, this service offers a highly accurate method capable of covering 99.7% of the COVID-19 genome and is designed to easily identify variant viruses.

Ryan Kim, CEO of Somagen, stated, “In the first quarter of this year alone, Somagen secured long-term COVID-19 diagnostic service contracts with four companies, including FTGCare, and currently, all employees are working day and night on diagnostic testing due to a shortage of manpower. With the addition of the variant analysis service to the existing COVID-19 services, we are growing rapidly as a multi-diagnostic specialist company for COVID-19 viruses in the U.S.”

Despite nationwide COVID-19 vaccine distribution in the U.S., the number of confirmed cases has remained high, with over 60,000 to 70,000 new cases daily recently, showing no signs of decline and even an increasing trend. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as of the 6th, approximately 16,000 cases of the UK-origin COVID-19 variant have been confirmed in the U.S., raising ongoing concerns about a fourth wave of the pandemic, the company explained.