Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited two sites in the North-East which are pioneering ways of combating Covid.

On Teesside, he visited FujiFilm, which is assisting in creating the Novavax vaccine, and then he went to Newcastle to visit a company which has developed a test for Covid which will provide results within 30 minutes.

QuantuMDx, on the site of the former Riverside nightclub in Newcastle, has developed a rapid, simple, portable testing device which it hopes will be used in NHS clinical settings.

The company, which was been assisted by a £16m Government grant, was originally developing its device to be used abroad to test for the presence of TB, cervical cancer and respiratory diseases, but the pandemic has caused it to refocus its efforts on combating Covid.

Its machine finishes its trials on Monday, and it is expected to have the same accuracy as lab-based tests.

It is hoped that the new testing machine, Q-POC, will be used as patients arrive in hospital to give a rapid diagnosis.

Jonathan O’Halloran, the chief executive of QuantuMDx, said: “Having the ability to run a rapid diagnostic swab test as the patient waits will provide the diagnostic silver bullet for hospital triague, A&E, ICU, business continuity, track and trace, and many more settings.

“The deployment of Q-POC at the point of care will provide another important tool in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic.”

Boris Johnson paid tribute to the way the region is innovating to tackle the pandemic, and revealed that he is setting up a “backlog busting” unit in No 10 to tackle the growing waiting lists in the NHS.

On a visit to the region, he went to Teesside to see vaccination developments and to Tyneside to see a new testing machine that produces results in 30 minutes.

“It is important for me to see how the North-East is paying its part,” he said. “It is absolutely bristling with new weapons to fight the disease. This testing machine here, the vaccination on Teesside, PPE not far away. A lot of cutting edge stuff is happening here.”

He repeated his desire to lift restrictions as soon as he can.

“We have got to keep the pandemic coming down as it is at the moment, and continue the roll out of the vaccination programme,” he said. “We have to do it one thing at a time, and be cautious.

“We are dealing with nature, the disease has new variants. We have to have a roadmap that’s realistic. We don’t want to have a series of stop starts or reverse ferrets.”

As restrictions are lifted, he spoke of the need to tackle the backlogs building up in the NHS and in the justice system.

“We will set up a backlog busting unit and as we come out, we will treat these as a priority,” he said.

“Education is the biggest challenge of all. We have a massive job of work to do there. It is hard to think of a generation that’s had such a challenge in modern times.”

He said innovations, like the simple, rapid, portable test being developed by Newcastle company QuantuMDx, would help the nation beat the virus.

“This can do a test in half-an-hour,” he said of the company’s Q-POC device that is finishing its trial evaluations on Monday. “Testing is getting faster and faster, and I think testing and vaccinations will provide the way forward.

“The Stockton & Darlington Railway is where it all began – it began up here and it is happening again. This (testing machine) didn’t exist nine months ago. It’s a wonderful piece of technology made in a former Newcastle nightclub.”