BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, has announced a $24 million investment from the U.S. Department of Defense in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to support the scale up of U.S. manufacturing capabilities for BD Veritor^™ Solution for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2.

The additional capital equipment will bolster domestic production and increase total production capacity by 50 percent. These investments will enable global production of more than 12 million test kits per month by the end of February 2021.

BD announced that it had received FDA emergency use authorization for the BD Veritor^™ Plus SARS-CoV-2 antigen assay on July 6, 2020 and plans to leverage its growing U.S. installed base of more than 25,000 BD Veritor^™ Plus instruments to enable the deployment of the SARS-CoV-2 assay across the U.S. The easy-to-use design of the instrument, slightly larger than a cell phone, makes it ideal for use in a variety of clinical settings including hospitals, clinician offices, urgent care centers, and retail pharmacies, where it has already been used in influenza, group A strep and RSV testing for several years.