Abstract

Rapid diagnosis of infectious diseases at point-of-care

Daniel Adlerstein, Director, Atlas Genetics Ltd

Successful treatment of infectious diseases requires a timely and accurate medical diagnosis. Rapid point-of-care (POC) tests are emerging as efficient tools for improving disease diagnosis and patient evaluation. Atlas Genetics has developed a novel rapid, fully-integrated system , the io™, that can be deployed and used in decentralised test settings, which can identify a variety of nucleic acid targets (either DNA or RNA) from multiple sample types in under 30 minutes. The io™ system performs all the steps of the assay from DNA extraction through to multiplex detection with no operator intervention following the addition of an unprocessed sample. Rapid, sample-to-result POC systems, like the io™, will considerably improve patient management by providing accurate and sensitive near-patient testing, expediting appropriate therapy, whilst reducing the patient pathway costs, such as logistics, treatment delays, the need for follow-up appointments, associated with central laboratory testing.