QIAGEN Adds dPCR Platform QIAcuity to Growing Portfolio of COVID-19 Testing Solutions for Wastewater and Mutation Testing
01/28/2021 - 04:05 PM
QIAGEN today announced the addition of kits for wastewater testing to its growing portfolio of COVID-19 products. The use of dPCR in the worldwide surveillance of COVID-19 is an additional step towards making digital PCR (dPCR) an affordable and standard instrument for a host of applications in molecular-testing laboratories worldwide.
The new kits are designed for use on the uniquely fast and easy-to-use series of QIAcuity instruments based on digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR) technology. QIAcuity precisely quantifies even minimal quantities of DNA and RNA in research tests for viruses, bacteria or genetic disorders, including the rarest of cancer mutations.
The precision of QIAcuity provides a valuable tool for use in testing wastewater for SARS-CoV-2. The application offers a cost-effective way to survey transmission dynamics of entire communities, avoiding the biases of other epidemiological indicators like deaths as a proportion of known cases or of the total population.
"In a trial run with the new high-throughput QIAcuity Eight, we were able to successfully detect new variants of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater samples," said Dr. Franz Durandet, President of I.A.G.E. in Montpellier, France. "Our tests have proven that this fast and scalable technology from QIAGEN can provide a valuable addition to our environmental biological testing services, which we will offer to our clients in the near future."
COVID-19 surveillance through wastewater testing allows public authorities to collect data from broad sweeps of the population, including people who do not feature in public-health statistics because they lack access to healthcare. Potentially, surveillance testing can reveal infection and mutation dynamics earlier than diagnostic testing, providing public-health officials with near-real-time information on disease prevalence.
Please find the full press release here
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Industry
Biological Product (except Diagnostic) Manufacturing
Sector
Manufacturing
Tags
Health Technology, Medical Specialties, Manufacturing, Biological Product (except Diagnostic) Manufacturing
Country
Netherlands
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Venlo
About QGEN
qiagen is the leading global provider of sample to insight solutions to transform biological materials into valuable molecular insights. qiagen sample technologies isolate and process dna, rna and proteins from blood, tissue and other materials. assay technologies make these biomolecules visible and ready for analysis. bioinformatics software and knowledge bases interpret data to report relevant, actionable insights. automation solutions tie these together in seamless and cost-effective molecular testing workflows. qiagen provides these workflows to more than 500,000 customers around the world in molecular diagnostics (human healthcare), applied testing (forensics, veterinary testing and food safety), pharma (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) and academia (life sciences research). as of june 30, 2015, qiagen employed approximately 4,400 people in over 35 locations worldwide. further information can be found at http://www.qiagen.com.
