Pathogenica Introduces Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI) BioDetection Kit

May 3, 2012 - PRLog -- BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – May 3, 2012 - Pathogenica, a pioneer in pathogen sequencing analysis, today announced the availability of its first product, the Pathogenica HAI (Hospital Acquired Infection) BioDetection Kit.  Based on Pathogenica’s DxSeq™ technology platform, it is the first DNA sequencing analysis product that enables identification of infectious disease with high accuracy, at high specific strain resolution and at a scale that makes hospital-wide testing practical.  Pathogenica’s HAI BioDetection Kit can test more than 12 different pathogens and 15 resistance gene families in a single assay; and up to 12 patient samples can be tested per sequencing, enabling dozens of samples to be tested in one day.  The kit is marked for Research Use Only (RUO) and works with any DNA sequencing platform.

“Current methods for detecting causative organisms can take up to two days for results and are limited in their ability to discriminate between hospital- and community-acquired infection or to identify organisms beyond a small group of common pathogens,” explains Yemi Adesokan, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Pathogenica.  “For effective surveillance and control of HAIs, it is necessary to identify the causative organism while also providing high-resolution sequence data that includes strain identity and resistance genes.  We have developed a low-cost sequencing assay that can address both these needs and deliver results in less than twelve hours.”

The HAI BioDetection Kit extracts the most informative pieces of DNA from the input sample to determine not only which species are present, but  also to provide strain-level identification that is critical to surveillance applications and outbreak tracking. Pathogenica's analysis software provides simple, concise output reports that indicate which species and strains are present and at what levels.  The intended use is for effective monitoring, tracking and control of hospital acquired infections, not for the diagnosis of hospital patients.

“Pathogenica’s biodetection system for hospital acquired infections has the potential to radically improve HAI management, rendering traditional testing methods obsolete,” said George Church, PhD, co-founder and chief scientific advisor at Pathogenica and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.  “The reduction of mortality rate, and economic burden, of HAIs could be significant.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the U.S. each year, approximately one in twenty hospitalized patients will contract a hospital-acquired infection (HAI), leading to 100,000 deaths and adding $4.5B in healthcare costs.

Each Pathogenica kit provides reagents for identification of the following pathogens and drug resistance markers per sample: Acinetobacter baumannii, Clostridium difficile, Escherichia coli, Enterococcus faecalis, Enterococcus faecium, Enterobacter aerogenes, Enterobacter cloacae, Klebsiella pneumonia, Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Coagulase negative staph (epidermidis, saprophyticus), Staphylococcus aureus, and common beta-lactamase resistance genes, mecA, and the vanA gene family.  The technology allows for fast modification to incorporate the detection of emerging pathogenic fungi, viruses and resistances.  

About Pathogenica
Pathogenica combines the power of Cloud-based DNA sequencing analysis and next-generation DNA sequencing to revolutionize pathogen identification and enable real-time bio-surveillance. Its DxSeq™ platform offers new applications in health services through rapid multiplex identification of pathogens and drug resistance genes; providing the potential for personalized diagnosis of infectious diseases that allows for more effective diagnosis and treatment of patients. Pathogenica’s high throughput pathogen identification system performs rapid and highly sensitive identification of a wide variety of biomarkers using a common assay protocol.  For more information, visit http://www.pathogenica.com.