NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – As part of a global launch of its hospital-acquired infection kit, Pathogenica today announced a deal with Life Technologies Japan to distribute the kit in Japan on the Ion Torrent platform.
The kit is the first DNA sequencing analysis product for identifying infectious disease "with high accuracy at high specific strain resolution and at a scale that makes hospital-wide testing practical," the companies said.
Pathogenica's HAI bio-detection Kit can test more than 12 different pathogens and 15 resistance gene families on a single assay, enabling the testing of dozens of samples in one day. Coupling it with the Ion Torrent system enables high accuracy and results that can be achieved in less than one day, Pathogenica and Life Technologies said.
"The ability to monitor the hospital environment for a number of prevalent infections on a daily basis accurately and cost-effectively enables hospitals to quickly understand where infections are coming from, isolate them, and stop them from spreading," Life Technologies Japan President Joydeep Goswami said in a statement.
The kit on the Ion Torrent platform extracts "the most informative pieces of DNA" from the input sample to determine the species present and to identify the strain, which is critical to surveillance and tracking outbreaks, the firms said. The kit, which is for research-use only, works with any DNA sequencing platform.
Pathogenica, which also today announced the launch of the kit, is a pathogen sequencing firm based in Boston. Its lead platform is the DxSeq platform, which uses selected sequencing to detect and assess biomarkers in tissue samples.