Biocept (NASDAQ: BIOC) reported a narrower loss in the second quarter of 2020. The company’s revenue declined by 23% year-over-year to $917,000, hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic. BIOC stock slumped about 9% in the after-market hours.
Biocept’s net loss attributable to common shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 stood at $6.5 million, or $0.05 per share compared to the net loss attributable to common shareholders of $7.8 million, or $0.38 per share in the second quarter of 2019.
Last week, Biocept signed an agreement with Aegea Biotechnologies, a private life sciences company, under which Biocept will co-develop a highly sensitive PCR-based assay designed by Aegea for detecting the COVID-19 virus.
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Biocept has received over 11,000 specimens to date for COVID testing. The San Diego-based company is developing its own COVID-19 specimen collection kits for distribution to clients and expects those kits to be available later in 2020.
“We have secured components to date for approximately 50,000 COVID-19 specimen collection kits to support current testing and expect to begin shipping our own COVID-19 specimen collection kits to our lab services customers later this year, which will contain our proprietary VEE-SURE viral transport media,” said CEO Michael Nall.
Last month, in email communication with AlphaStreet, the company spokesperson said that it expects the proprietary Biocept-developed COVID-19 collection kits to be available in the third quarter of 2020.