Pakistan’s testing capacity increases with launch of robot-operated facility

Future Trust and Opencell UK have worked together to launch a Covid-19 testing facility in Islamabad that is wholly operated by robots in an effort to increase the country’s overall testing capacity, it emerged on Wednesday.

The new facility, known as Future Labs, can conduct up to 2,000 tests a day while requiring as little as six human staff members to operate it. It was built in the United Kingdom by Opencell. The laboratory is a Biosafety Level 2 plus (BSL-2+) facility built to ISO 15189 standards and is designed to meet the requirements for high throughput COVID-19 RT-qPCR testing.

The laboratory was set up by Future Trust, a non-profit organisation that is a part of the JS group.

The lab was inaugurated by British High Commissioner Christian Turner, who thanked Ambassador-at-Large for Foreign Investments Ali Jehangir Ambassador Siddiqui for “making him excited about the project”.

“UK is proud of having been in the forefront of the fight against Covid-19 in its efforts to pursue a vaccine and its distribution internationally, as well as for providing development assistance to a broad spectrum of Covid relief, through UK Aid, to Pakistan,” he said during the launch event.

Meanwhile. Siddiquie at the event said, “This partnership between entities in the UK and Pakistan is of importance to us not just because the two countries are so close but also because this represents a partnership in life sciences which is the need for the world at this moment in time.”

Head of Molecular Biology for Future Labs, Dr Azeem Butt said that it was “heartening to see corporate organisations such as JS Bank and Future Trust working on innovation in science to fight Covid-19”.