Tu162 - A New Fast Detection Approach for Microbial and Infectious Disease Assays in Digital PCR

Abstract Text: Healthcare-associated (nosocomial) infections (HAIs) represent the most common adverse event among hospitalized patients worldwide and is a major public health concern in hospitals. There are 6 most common types that attributed to approximately 722,000 infections and over 90,000 deaths according to CDC; among them, healthcare-associated urinary tract infection (HA-UTI) and surgical site infection (SSI) contribute to prolonged stay, disability, mortality, and multidrug-resistant. Regularly surveillant on pathogens from clinical and wastewater specimens is helpful in keeping check on antimicrobial usage and drug-resistance and are important for infectious disease management and prevention for nosocomial infections and multi drug resistance (MDR) monitoring.
Here we introduce QIAcuity dPCR system and nanoplate technology that is fast, sensitive, more consistent at lower concentrations, and show easy adaptability for 4/5-plexes microbial assays and eliminated the need for standards making it a viable, low cost, fast, sensitive option for microbial detection for infectious diseases. It automates and streamlines the digital PCR workflow of partitioning, thermocycling and imaging, and generates absolute quantitation data in approximately 2 hours. It’s ideal for use with QIAGEN GeneGlobe microbial assays, custom lab-developed tests (LDTs) in clinical research or commercial qPCR assays for microbial detection.
In this study, we randomly selected five probe-based assays involved in UTI and wastewater from predesigned, web-lab validated microbial assay portfolio, and compared the assay in 1-plex and 5-plexes. Data show comparable performance, high precision and sensitivity when run with pool of synthetic long oligos and genomic positive reference DNAs in 4-logs of dilutions. Data is comparable with quantitative-PCR.