DGX - Here's Why Quidel Hologic and Quest Diagnostics Shares Fell Today
Shares of Quidel (NASDAQ: QDEL) were down a whopping 27% at 2:27 p.m. EDT on Thursday after rival Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) gained emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its 15-minute, $5 test for the novel coronavirus. Fellow test makers Hologic (NASDAQ: HOLX) and Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX) were down 6% and 7%, respectively.
Quidel fell the most because its COVID-19 test, the Sofia SARS Antigen FIA, is in the same class as Abbott's BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card test. Both are so-called antigen tests that detect the coronavirus by looking for the viral proteins rather than genetic material from the coronavirus, which molecular tests detect.
The advantage of testing for proteins versus genetic material is that the latter generally has to be amplified, which takes time and requires a machine to run the molecular amplification steps.