Gastro-Intestinal screening stepped up a notch

Convential vs molecular syndromic approach

Even today stool analysis in suspected gastro-enteritis remains a challenge.

Clinical & workflow hurdles

With the general, overlapping and non-discriminating symptoms it’s near to impossible for the clinician to request the right targeted assays or tests.

Next to the symptoms, the various contexts like travel, food and liquids, exposure to infected stool,… make it even harder to pin down a probable category of pathogens (bacterial, viral or parasite), let alone a specific test. Pathogen specific requesting also allows alternative causative pathogens to go undetected.

The Turn Around Time (TAT) for bacterial culture of up to 3 days can lead to potential unnecessary empirical antibiotic usage, increased length of stay or even patient release without diagnosis.

Rapid Ag-testing for viral pathogens and cultures are known to suffer from potential limited specificity and/or sensitivity.

Microscopy for parasite detection requires technical expertise, is very labor intensive and lacks sensitivity in case of low levels of infection.

All of the above techniques require a significant hands-on-time,?expert knowledge for testing and interpretation and can have a prolonged time to result.

Syndromic molecular GI testing impact

In a syndromic, real-time PCR approach with availability of separate multi pathogen viral, bacterial and parasite (protozoa & helminth) panels many of these hurdles are eliminated.

The risk of overlooked or missed pathogens is reduced with the detection of up to 25 different pathogens (34 including helminth) in a single run. This has shown to provide up to 26% additional pathogens to be detected(1) due to the higher sensitivity of the technique.

Detection of co-infection, provides the most relevant information to the clinicians to personalize the treatment for each individual patient.

The TAT for reporting can be reduced to ≤1 day, which provides timely, actionable results and the potential to limit empirical antibiotic usage. It has shown to reduce the length of stay and redundant follow up examinations like endoscopy by up to 12%(2).

The pre-analytical stool sample handling gets limited to the sample transfer to a medium of your preference (eNAT, cary-blair,…) creating a uniform workflow for all fecal samples. Some of these media can be used for both culture and qPCR, while others are specially designed for molecular testing. All media have their own preservation properties.

The automation platform with full bidirectional connectivity combined with the separate viral, bacterial and parasite panels allow for either full panel testing or a stepwise reflex panel approach, all from the same eluent for the optimal efficiency both timewise and economical.

The complete GI solution with limited pre-analytical steps and uniform workflow reduces the hands-on time to such an extent, an equal to less expensive total cost can be achieved compared to conventional analysis, taking labor into account.

Want to discover how Accuramed and Seegene can optimize your gastro-intestinal testing by qPCR for detection of viruses, bacteria and parasites (protozoa and helminth) both clinically and in efficiency?

Contact us at?[email protected]?or +32 (13) 53 17 31

?(1)?Clinical evaluation of Allplex? GI Assay (Oral presentation at 2016 ECCMID, Seegene integrated symposium )

(2) Beal, S. G., Tremblay, E. E., Toffel, S., Velez, L., & Rand, K. H. (2018). A Gastrointestinal PCR Panel Improves Clinical Management and Lowers Health Care Costs. Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 56(1). https://doi.org/10.1128/jcm.01775-18

(3)?Zimmermann, S., Horner, S., Altwegg, M., & Dalpke, A. H. (2020). Workflow optimization for syndromic diarrhea diagnosis using the molecular Seegene AllplexTM GI-Bacteria(I) assay. European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, 39(7), 1245–1250. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-020-03837-4