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Photo: Marco Reufzaat
A red and neon yellow pattern, sirloin and blue light: from the outside, the MAN TGE transporter looks like a normal ambulance.
But if you step through the sliding door, you are in a laboratory.
It's tight in there, but otherwise it hardly differs from such a room in a clinic.
There are work tables for the laboratory technicians and storage cupboards for sterile protective clothing.
Boxes of rubber gloves hang on the walls and the drawers are full of swabs for the smear and cartridges for the test.
Car manufacturers are in demand again in the corona crisis.
First they built ventilators and sewed mouth and nose guards.
Now they are increasingly contributing their core competencies.
Mobile test centers and laboratories on wheels should make tests more available.
Authorities could make it easier to track down infected people and contain the virus.
The idea of the mobile laboratory is not entirely new.
But compromises were mostly made in old city buses, and large trucks or containers served as laboratories.
Now there are the first vans with full equipment.
"This makes you faster and more mobile and you need fewer staff because everyone can take the wheel," says Dennis Affeld.
He is responsible for strategy and new projects at MAN and is in a converted TGE van, which will soon be in use for the first time after six months of development.
The box costs just under 650,000 euros.
It is three times as expensive as a conventional ambulance and more than twelve times as expensive as the base vehicle with 177 hp diesel, all-wheel drive and eight-speed automatic.
It was largely assembled and assembled by hand within six weeks and is due to go into series production from November.
Medical service providers, laboratory companies, ambulance operators and emergency services in the fight against the corona virus should use it.
Tests in vehicles could save a lot of time
Experts hope that such vehicles will provide important successes in containing the pandemic.
Instead of sending the potential patients to doctors and authorities, the tests would have to come to the hotspots, says Gerd Geißlinger, health research officer at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and managing director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME.
The professor hopes that a lot of time can be saved with such vehicles: Instead of having to wait up to four days for a test result, the mobile laboratories promise valid results after less than an hour.
"This is the only way we have a chance to identify infected people early and quickly and to minimize contacts in a targeted manner," says Geißlinger.
Linked to this is the goal of expanding the test capacities.
"In the next few months we will face the particular challenge of having to test people more," says Research Minister Anja Karliczek, who supports Fraunhofer research: "It is important to me that people have clarity about their state of health as quickly as possible. "
At first glance, the interior of the van is slightly reminiscent of a repurposed motorhome.
A closer look reveals what the expert from the medical aid organization for epidemic protection, who advised Affold, placed value on: All surfaces are chosen so that they can be easily disinfected.
The floor is sealed with a protective layer without joints and gaps.
There are germ-proof garbage boxes for protective suits and rubber gloves.
The sink and tap are sensor-controlled.
And of course, the cabin and box body are hermetically separated.
16 test devices at 25,000 euros each
The most important equipment feature, however, are the test cartridges: Filled with the sample and all the necessary reagents, these are pushed into the Vivalytic devices developed by Bosch.
16 of them are attached to the side walls in the back of the van.
They're not much bigger than a tape recorder, but they cost € 25,000 each.
They swallow five samples per run and analyze them on the basis of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which Bosch praises as the gold standard among the corona tests.
Affeld explains the so-called pooling process only if they deliver a positive result (which statistically happens in around 0.5 percent of all cases) do the five samples have to be re-examined individually.
Because the devices spit out a reliable result within 39 minutes exactly
,
the Corona-Mobile creates within an hour around 100 tests and comes a day up to 800 tests.
Test persons can take their results with them almost immediately - unlike in the stationary procedure, where the samples are sent in and the results are often transmitted by fax.
Optionally, the results are transmitted to health authorities, clinics, employers or to the client of the tests via the built-in modem.
In Affold's eyes, the test mobile is therefore not only suitable for use in hospitals, retirement homes, schools, national borders or in small communities with limited medical infrastructure, but also for prevention at major events: Congress organizers know within a few hours whether their guests are clean.
Plant managers could test their employees in shifts and trainers could safely send their teams into competitions.
But one problem remains: Statistically, the test method used does not recognize two out of 100 infected people.
That is why most experts consider it irresponsible to simply test crowds in front of corporations or other events and let them in shortly afterwards.
Even the mobile laboratories will not enable a largely relaxed life during the pandemic.
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However, it is not only MAN who uses such vehicles.
The Fraunhofer Institute has also built a prototype.
Unlike MAN and Bosch, the researchers do not rely on the PCR tests, but rather on the loop-mediated isothermal amplification method, in which the isothermal multiplication of the desired target sequences of the virus is examined.
This has a decisive advantage: According to the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, this can also be done with a mouthwash instead of a smear, which many test subjects find more pleasant.
But the process also has one disadvantage: it is not yet certified.
In view of such progress, the hopes of the scientists are high: Such vehicles could help to contain the infection process and make it more transparent - so that despite the lockdown, the entire cultural and economic life would not have to be shut down.
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