Specific Technologies unveils SpecID blood culture system at General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology

May 16 2014

Specific Technologies, developer of the SpecID™ system to rapidly detect and identify bacterial species and strain via a metabolomic fingerprint, today announced that for the first time it will showcase its transformative SpecID blood culture system at the 114^th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, May 17-20, 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The SpecID system will be featured in the Specific Technologies booth #1407.

The SpecID blood culture system determines species and strain, combining incubation, detection, and identification into one fully automated step in a blood culture bottle. As a result, the SpecID system detects blood infection more than four times faster — two days sooner— than conventional blood culture practices. This approach contrasts with all other systems in current use in which characterization of the specific bacteria species requires additional steps, additional sample preparation, and expense. Further, the SpecID system delivers identification before current methods can simply detect a positive presence of infection.

Bloodstream infection causing sepsis is the most expensive condition treated in hospitals; in the U.S. alone sepsis leads to more than $20 billion in health care costs annually. Sepsis is the 10^th leading cause of death, killing more than prostate cancer, breast cancer, and HIV/AIDS combined, and is responsible for 11 percent of intensive care unit admissions with a mortality rate estimated at 28 to 50 percent.

"We're looking forward to debuting the SpecID system at ASM, a meeting that draws thousands of attendees who will find great value in our fully automated system that simplifies a traditionally multistep process," said Dr. Paul Rhodes, Chief Executive Officer of Specific Technologies and ASM poster author. "Sepsis mortality increases every hour until the effective antibiotic is determined. It's important for clinical microbiologists to learn about SpecID, which has the proven capability to characterize blood infection while also identifying bacteria species and strain."

During the 2014 ASM General Meeting, two posters will illustrate the advanced application of the SpecID technology. One poster will report on new study results demonstrating discrimination of bacterial strain suggesting a new paradigm for the detection of hospital acquired infection (HAI) as well as the capability to track strains of resistant bacteria, a problem of growing magnitude worldwide. A second poster will show how the technology readily distinguished differential susceptibility with the measurements accurately predicting antibiotic susceptibility.