Daewoong Pharmaceutical is actively engaging in the Covid-19 diagnostic kit business, saying it would roll out a rapid Covid-19 antigen test kit in Korea within the first half of this year.

Pharmaceutical industry sources said on Friday that Daewoong was getting ready to launch a rapid Covid-19 testing kit.

An official at Daewoong also said the company aimed to release a rapid Covid-19 antigen test kit in the first half.

Daewoong is gearing up for the local release of the rapid antigen device, especially after Calth, the supplier of the test kit, obtained the marketing approval for the product from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on Friday last week.

In July last year, Daewoong and Calth, a diagnostics company, signed an agreement to supply Covid-19 rapid antigen diagnostic kits.

The deal made it official that Daewoong was entering the Covid-19 diagnostics market.

Daewoong is expected to sell Calth’s “AllCheck COVID-19 Ag.”

According to Daewoong, the AllCheck test kit uses immunochromatography to detect the presence of viruses in smears collected from a person's nasopharynx and can yield the result within 15 minutes. Clinical results showed that the device’s sensitivity was 92.11 percent, and the specificity, 99.52 percent.

Daewoong also plans to supply Calth’s AllCheck device to the Vietnamese market.

Last November, Daewoong signed a deal with Vietha Pharma Corp., a Vietnamese drugmaker, to sell 12 billion won worth of Covid-19 diagnostic kits.

Daewoong will use the Vietnamese government’s public bidding to secure government procurement, the company said.

Starting from Vietnam, Daewoong will expand the sales of the diagnostic kit across Southeast Asia, the company added.