The Inhale project is assessing respiratory disease tests on Oxford Nanopore's MinIon and PCR platforms from Curetis and BioMérieux's BioFire Diagnostics.
BioMérieux said that the FilmArray RP2 reduces sample-to-result time to 45 minutes from about one hour, and provides increased pathogen coverage and sensitivity.
Companies with diverse infectious disease diagnostic technology offerings said that molecular methods are complementary to, not competitive with traditional diagnostics.
The study involved 11 sites and 1,560 prospectively collected patient samples and demonstrated high overall positive and negative percent agreement with comparator assays.
ISS astronauts will soon begin testing the Oxford Nanopore MinIon and two PCR platforms while researchers on Earth continue to evaluate microarrays for use in space.
