LGC and Abbott will jointly identify and develop commercial diagnostic applications for the T5000 Biosensor System after the two companies signed a licensing agreement.
The Ibis T5000 Biosensor System is an automated platform that rapidly identifies and characterises genomic material from micro-organisms.
It is currently only used for research.
Under the terms of the agreement, LGC will have an exclusive licence to develop non-clinical applications in the UK and a non-exclusive licence to develop clinical and food-testing applications.
The system's platform technology is based on a combination of PCR and high-performance mass spectrometry.
In combination with Abbott's bespoke database of thousands of microorganisms, the Ibis T5000 can identify most types of bacteria, viruses and fungi.
It can also provide information about drug resistance, virulence and the strain type of these pathogens.
The Ibis T5000 Biosensor System is currently used for epidemiologic surveillance, monitoring pandemic diseases, identifying emerging or previously unknown pathogens, forensically characterising human samples and identifying sources of hospital-associated infections.
In the future it will be used for human infectious disease diagnostics.
LGC is planning a microbial identification diagnostics service built around the T5000 Biosensor System.
The T5000 Biosensor System has already been deployed and endorsed by many US agencies involved in pathogen and infection control.
