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Utah Company Promises Faster, Better 'Superbug' Test

211 views · Published 30 May 2013 · 2:29 · Indexed 28 October 2026

Channel: KUTV 2 News Salt Lake City · 2013 · News & Politics

By Ladd Egan(KUTV) A Southern Utah-based company has announced that its infectious disease testing system will have exclusive rights to a new test for drug-resistant superbugs. DxNA LLC, located in St. George, says its test will offer hospitals and other care facilities quicker, cheaper and more detailed detection of Staphylococcus strains including MRSA. Antibiotic-resistant strains of Staph are a huge issue, a big problem in hospitals, said DxNA President and CEO David Taus. If we can provide them answers immediately, this will affect treatment.Superbugs cause hospital-acquired infections in surgical sites, around medical device implants, in the skin and soft tissue and are resistant to regular antibiotics. The Associated Press recently reported that in U.S. hospitals, 1 in 20 patients catch infections they didnt have when they arrived and that those infections are linked to an estimated 100,000 deaths every year. Under a new agreement, DxNAs portable testing system GeneSTAT will have the exclusive rights to Flagstaff, Arizona-based PathGenes Next Generation test which can identify and differentiate between three of the most common types of Staph. The GeneSTAT molecular-based analyzer is about the size of a toaster oven. The test it performs depends on the single-use cartridge inserted into the machine which contains a sample vial, control agent and a radio frequency identification tag which relays instructions on how to do the analysis. The idea was to have a simple, diagnostic device that could be taken right on sight, Taus said. You could do bedside or onsite field testing.Taus says the GeneSTAT will give health care workers unmatched speed and simplicity at a fraction of the cost of traditional laboratory testing. To be able to get the same answers that we can provide in less than two hours, now takes 48-72 hours to get that result, he said. Company officials say with their technology, small hospitals in rural areas would be able to afford on-site testing and that larger hospitals could install small testing stations in emergency rooms to monitor results in real time. It makes a huge difference, DxNA Chief Operating Officer Ernie Sumsion said of the quicker test. Physicians cannot afford, in the interest of their patients, to wait even 12 hours on one of these infections.DxNA says it will take about a year to get the superbug test ready for market. (Copyright 2013 Sinclair Broadcasting Group)

Utah Company Promises Faster, Better 'Superbug' Test

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