New Research Shows MicroPhage Test Accurately and Rapidly Detects Serious Bacterial ...(ng for MRSA and antibiotic susceptibilit...),Health

For research reported in the second presentation, nasal swabs were collected at a community hospital and a tertiary care center in Colorado to screen patients for MRSA. The MicroPhage assay showed excellent specificity and sensitivity and laboratory personnel required only a short training session.

"The study showed the test procedure is easy to learn and execute and requires no specialized, dedicated equipment," said Smith. "Further, it is a flexible procedure that can be used in a variety of testing and reporting scenarios."

In their third presentation, MicroPhage researchers demonstrated the breadth of the technology platform, showing that several antibiotics could be tested accurately to provide an easy-to-use method to guide antibiotic therapy. In this study, it was demonstrated that eight different antibiotics could be tested using bacteriophage amplification technology with an accuracy of 95 percent or greater on 184 total strains tested.

By contrast, physicians do not have antibiotic testing information when they prescribe these drugs for suspected infections. MicroPhage is the first company to present research showing that an easy-to-use diagnostic, similar to that of a pregnancy test, could help guide appropriate antibiotic prescribing in hospitals and other clinical settings.

Easy-to-use, natural detection technology

The MicroPhage system has two incubation tubes for incubating blood culture specimens. After five hours, the incubated samples are added to two dipstick-like detectors. One detector shows if the sample is infected with staph bacteria and the other indicates the antibiotic susceptibility of the bacterial strain.

MicroPhage has adapted bacteriophage amplification technology, a natural biologic process, for detecting staph infections. "Phages" are viruses that multiply agg
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