St. Louis, MO – FEBURARY 11, 2015 – BacterioScan Inc. a premier in vitro lab diagnostics company announced that it has been selected as the winner of the 2015 Prism Award for innovation in photonics for biomedical instrumentation by SPIE, the international photonics and optics society.
Winners were announced Wednesday night in San Francisco at a gala event recognizing the most innovative new technologies in the international photonics industry. Award winners in other categories included Intel, Corning, IPG Photonics, Hamamatsu, Raytheon, and other leaders and innovators in state-of-the-art photonic products and technologies.
BacterioScan’s premier product (Model 216Dx) provides rapid detection of bacterial Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) using a proprietary precision laser sensor, and reduces the time-to-result by 95% for the vast majority of samples while reducing lab workload by more than 60%. Implementation of this UTI technology speeds diagnosis, and can contribute to reducing a major contributor of hospital-acquired infection. BacterioScan’s advanced sensor technology is also being developed to provide rapid detection of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, reducing the time for determining optimum treatment from several days down to a few hours, improving patient care, reducing the cost of effective treatment, and helping fight the emergence of bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics.
“The inappropriate an excessive use of antibiotics is leading to rapidly spreading bacterial resistance, and structural and technical challenges in the antimicrobial drug industry have nearly halted the development of needed new drugs”, says President and CEO, Dana Marshall. The CDC estimates that over 23,000 Americans die annually from resistant bacterial infection, and the direct and indirect cost of resistant infection in the US alone is estimated to exceed $50 billion. He added that “the global threat to antibiotic effectiveness, combined with the spiraling cost of resistance, has created a new and urgent need for faster and more capable microbial diagnostic solutions.”
The BacterioScan sensor was created by researchers in Israel, and has been in development in St. Louis for several years. BacterioScan’s instruments were introduced to researchers in 2014, and have been employed by several world-class research hospitals and universities to examine new and rapid modes for detection antibiotic resistance and measuring susceptibility for a variety of infectious diseases. Initial work, including recent publication from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and others, has indicated that the technology can reduce the time for selection of effective antibiotic therapy from 30+ hours to less than 3 hours, offering a potential breakthrough in addressing the worldwide urgent challenge of antibiotic resistance.
About BacterioScan Inc.
BacterioScan Inc. is an in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) company based in St. Louis focused on the rapid detection and real-time quantification of bacteria in fluid using optical measurements. BacterioScan instruments can rapidly detect infection, classify the organism by type and size, determine if it is resistant to a range of antibiotics, and provide clinicians with patient-specific guidance on the most rapid and cost-effective treatment plan. BacterioScan’s first medical device product is a compact, simple, and low-cost system for rapid detection of Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) for use in clinical microbiology labs. BacterioScan is a privately held corporation, with operations in St Louis Missouri, and Israel.
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