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Becton Dickinson Wins FDA Approval For 15-Minute Covid-19 Test

Becton Dickinson (BDX) on Monday said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency-use authorization (EUA) for its portable COVID-19 antigen test that delivers results in 15 minutes.  

Shares advanced 3% to $252.30 in afternoon trading. The medical technology company will begin shipping the new test this week. It expects to ramp-up manufacturing capacity to 2 million tests per week by the end of September and to produce up to 10 million tests from July through September.This is the company’s third diagnostic COVID-19 test to receive EUA status by the FDA.

“This will be a game-changer for frontline health care workers and their patients to be able to access a quick diagnostic test for COVID-19, offering results in real-time at convenient locations like retail pharmacies, urgent care centers and doctors’ offices,” said Dave Hickey, Integrated Diagnostic Solutions President at Becton Dickinson. “Such tests will also help communities be better prepared to help prevent new spikes and additional waves of COVID-19 by enabling public health workers to quickly identify infectious individuals and trace their contacts.”   

The test runs on the BD Veritor System, which is slightly larger than a cell phone, and is currently in use at more than 25,000 hospitals, clinician offices, urgent care centers and retail pharmacies in all 50 U.S. states. It has a one-button functionality and its ease-of-use make it a solution for settings without laboratory personnel. It also provides real-time reporting capabilities through the BD Synapsys informatics tool to easily trace data for disease monitoring and surveillance purposes.

Five-star analyst Larry Biegelsen at Wells Fargo, who reiterated a Buy rating on the stock, said that assuming 2 million tests per week were produced at an average price of $18, the Veritor COVID-19 antigen test could generate revenue of about $470 million per quarter, if Becton would sell all of its capacity.

Shares in Becton Dickinson are still down 7% so far this year and analysts have a cautiously optimistic Moderate Buy consensus on the stock with 6 Buy ratings versus 7 Hold ratings. The $273 average price target indicates 8.8% upside potential in the shares over the coming 12 months. (See BDX stock analysis on TipRanks)

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Sharon Wrobel
Sharon Wrobel is a journalist and writer with two decades of experience covering financial news in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in global publications including The Financial Times, Bloomberg and The Jerusalem Post.

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