The second Lighthouse Lab in Alderley Park is now operational, testing thousands of patient samples each day for coronavirus.
The lab will help rapidly increase the country’s capacity to test for coronavirus to tens of thousands of samples each day.
Alderley Park is the second site to become fully operational, after the Health Secretary officially opened the first Lighthouse Lab in Milton Keynes last week. The final site will open in Glasgow next week, completing the largest network of diagnostic testing facilities in British history.
Testing Minister Lord Bethell spoke to teams at the two fully operational Lighthouse Labs on Friday to thank them for their tireless efforts to rapidly scale up testing and was taken on a virtual tour of the new site at Alderley Park.
Lighthouse Labs in Milton Keynes, Alderley Park and Glasgow have increased their staff with teams of highly qualified volunteers from industry and academia, supporting them to rapidly set up facilities with huge capacity to test patient samples.
Every day new drive-through testing sites are being opened to fill the testing capacity the Lighthouse Labs can now provide, with 20 new sites now taking patient samples across the country.
