NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Accelerate Diagnostics yesterday announced that it has partnered with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Laboratory to develop faster methods of analyzing biological threats such as anthrax and plague.
Accelerate Dx will develop assays for rapid identification of infectious pathogens, their virulence markers, and their antibiotic susceptibility and resistance profiles. The CDC will provide its expertise on the molecular biology of the biothreat agents, and it will evaluate and optimize the performance of the platform using its collection of harmful biological agents.
The platform provides "high-speed identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing of pathogens," and "enables laboratories to provide critical microbiology results in hours instead of days," Tucson, Ariz.-based Accelerate Dx said in a statement. The platform uses genomic and phenotypic detection technologies and does not require samples to be grown in culture, thereby reducing the time needed to deliver results: only one hour to identify the pathogen and five hours to determine antimicrobial susceptibility.
As part of the deal, the CDC has purchased Accelerate Dx's ID/AST platform for the laboratory.