A pharmaceutical company just announced a rapid-result coronavirus test - and its billionaire owner made $100 million
- DiaSorin, an Italian pharmaceutical company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Gustavo Denegri, announced Tuesday that it will launch a new, faster test for the novel coronavirus by the end of the month.
- Shares of DiaSorin shot up 18% after the announcement, growing its founder's net worth by $100 million, Forbes' Giacomo Tognini reported.
- The speed and availability of tests has hampered the response to the outbreak, especially in the United States.
- Italy has reported more cases of coronavirus than any other country besides China and was placed on a nationwide lockdown by its government on Monday night as a result.
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A billionaire-led Italian pharmaceutical company has developed a faster way to test for the novel coronavirus that is sweeping the globe - and it's already made a lot of money doing so.
DiaSorin announced Tuesday that its new coronavirus test would slash the wait time for results from between five and seven hours to just one hour and would launch by the end of the month pending approvals from regulators, according to a press release. Shares of DiaSorin jumped 18% after the announcement, Forbes reported.
That's good news for DiaSorin's billionaire founder Gustavo Denegri. Denegri owns 45% of the company and is now nearly $100 million richer than he was before the announcement, according to Forbes. His net worth is now $3.1 billion, Forbes estimates.
The new test could also boost the efforts of US authorities to contain the spread of the virus, as testing kits have been in short supply. Compared with many other countries affected by the coronavirus, the US has done the fewest COVID-19 tests per capita, Business Insider reported on Monday. The US has performed five coronavirus tests per million people, compared with South Korea's 3,692 tests per million people. The lag in testing has made it difficult for American authorities to get a sense of how widespread the outbreak is.
The Saluggia, Italy-based pharmaceutical company's announcement came less than 24 hours after the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that the entire country would be locked down in an attempt to contain the coronavirus outbreak there. Italy reported more than 9,100 cases of coronavirus and 463 deaths as of Tuesday afternoon, making it the most affected country outside of China. More than 118,000 people have been diagnosed with a respiratory illness caused by the virus, which is believed to have jumped from animals to people in a wet market in Wuhan, China. About 70% of the reported cases and deaths have been in China.
Global health crises are nothing new for Denegri and DiaSorin however. The company also quickly developed rapid testing kits for swine flu during that pandemic in 2009 and for the Zika virus during its outbreak in 2017, according to Forbes.