WOW Technology at ECCMID 2014: Highlights and Poster Bank – Part 2

The 24th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases was this year held in the beautiful city of Barcelona. ECCMID has grown steadily in size and importance, and this year’s Congress had a real buzz of excitement around it. This article contains the highlights from the exhibition as well as product related posters from the poster hall.

This year’s exhibition reflected the emergence of next generation sequencing (NGS) into the clinical market. Vela Diagnostics was showcasing the Sentosa SX101, a flexible instrument which can be used for lysis, extraction, automated PCR set up and library prep. The SX101 is linked via a middleware to the customer LIS and can be fully integrated into qPCR and NGS workflows. Also on the Vela booth was the SQ301, a NGS system which has not yet been launched. The Vela team has many years of experience in IVD labs (differentiating them from some of the other major NGS players); the company has the goal of bringing NGS to routine diagnostic testing and is one to watch over the next few years.

To find out more about NGS systems currently on the market, download our newly released, exclusive NGS Buying Guide.

Anagnostics was displaying the new sepsis early detection assay aimed at the early detection of sepsis markers in whole blood, and capable of identifying very low copy numbers in a sample. The test utilizes hybcell technology, a revolutionary cylindrical microarray. To learn more about early pathogen detection using hybcell technology, watch the video here. To download the poster presented by Anagnostics at ECCMID click on the link below:

Fast and Cost-Effective Pathogen Diagnosis on an Automated DNA/Protein Diagnostics Platform Based on Cylindrical Microarrays (hybcells).

There were a number of new point-of-care analyzers and kits on display, as technological advances make near patient testing increasingly achievable. ArcDia International Ltd. was displaying the MariPOC®, a highly specific antigen detection method for acute respiratory infections. The world’s first antigen test for human bocavirus type 1, a DNA virus found in 2005, was made commercially available for the mariPOC test platform earlier this year.

ArcDia presented two posters during ECCMID:

• Development of Human Bocavirus Antigen Test for mariPOC® Platform

• Antigen Detection from Feces by Separation-Free Fluorescence TPX Assay Technique


Micronics was giving delegates a sneak preview of the PanNAT^TM point-of-care analyzer, not yet commercially available. The PanNAT has been designed to bring molecular testing to the non-molecular lab. The analyzer is a compact, portable instrument that automates the molecular testing process from sample extraction/pre-treatment to result readout. The minimum ‘hands on time’ means that there is no need for specialized personnel or separate extraction equipment. Assays in development for the system include Shiga-toxin producing E.coli (STEC) and other enteric pathogens, bacteria and viral pathogens.