NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Two hospitals in the Netherlands — the University Medical Center Groningen and Amphia Hospital — plan to evaluate and adopt Pathogenica's next-generation sequencing-based HAI BioDetection Kit in the surveillance and monitoring of infectious bacteria, the company said today.
Pathogenica's kit uses molecular inversion probe technology and targeted sequencing to enable the identification and subtyping of the 12 bacterial species that are responsible for more than 95 percent of hospital-acquired infections.
The University Medical Center Groningen plans to first test the kit in a pilot for the active surveillance of common drug-resistant bacteria, focusing on intensive care units. The hospital's Department of Medical Microbiology and Infection Prevention plans to run the kit on Life Technologies' Ion Torrent PGM.
Alex Friedrich, chair of Medical Microbiology and Infection Prevention at UMCG, said in a statement that Pathogenica's kit plus sequencing on the PGM "promises same or next-day turnaround for identification of both strain and drug-resistance information about a bacterial infection or colonization."
The team at Amphia Hospital has already started using Pathogenica's technology in assessing an outbreak of multi-drug resistant Escherichia coli. Amphia is also running the kit on the PGM.
"The complex epidemiology of Enterobacteriaceae requires technology that can both address the molecular fingerprint of bacteria as well as the resistance genes involved," Jan Kluytmans, head of Infection Control and Microbiology at Amphia, said in a statement.
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.