NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario will collaborate with BioTrove to evaluate the company’s nanofluidic PCR technology for use in detecting and monitoring respiratory infectious disease pathogens in children.
The collaboration will combine BioTrove’s OpenArray with CHEO’s “clinical and molecular biology expertise for rapid, simultaneous identification and quantification of multiple viral and bacterial respiratory pathogens in a clinical specimen,” the company said.
Robert Slinger, who is a medical microbiologist at CHEO, said in a statement that the collaborators intend to design an “all-inclusive assay to rapidly identify and quantify over thirty infectious respiratory viral and bacterial disease targets, potentially enabling physicians to prescribe the right therapies for their patients almost immediately.”
These targets include viral agents such as influenza and emerging pathogens such as MRSA.
BioTrove Chief Technology Officer Colin Brenan said in a statement that the collaborative research could “lead to additional applications for the OpenArray platform, and speaks to the viability and potential of this research system as an applied tool in the clinical laboratory setting.”
Financial terms of the agreement were not released.