LabWare is recognized as the global leader of Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) and instrument integration software products
LabWare’s Portable Disease Surveillance Lab Kit (Credit: Business Wire.)
Tangen Biosciences, Inc., today announced that the company and LabWare, Inc. agreed to enter into an exclusive partnership whereby LabWare will distribute Tangen’s GeneSpark™ device as part of the LabWare’s Portable Disease Surveillance Lab kit in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. LabWare’s kit includes a mobile hot spot and a tablet computer connected to a cloud-based Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) software portal to capture patient demographic and clinical information, document field collection of respiratory swabs for COVID-19 testing, accession the sample, and rapidly disseminate this data to public health agencies.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, LabWare designed the Portable Disease Surveillance Lab kit to fit all the necessary components in a suitcase to enable patient registration and testing in field locations such as drive-up testing or assisted living facilities. Patient demographics and triage details will be captured on the tablet computer, and the information will be transferred to the cloud. With the addition of the Tangen testing system, high priority patient specimens will be tested immediately with Tangen’s GeneSpark device, and both the patient details and test results will be transferred electronically through LabWare’s cloud-based LIMS to public health labs and the CDC in less than 30 minutes. The fast turnaround time should greatly improve surveillance programs.
Beyond COVID-19, Tangen is making a Flu/COVID-19 Panel that can detect Flu A, Flu B and COVID-19 simultaneously from one patient sample in a single processing run, so that patients with flu-like symptoms will know whether they have flu or COVID-19 infection or none of them. Tangen expects to continue its partnership with LabWare to include this multi-target testing. The combination of Tangen’s rapid, highly sensitive and point-of-care molecular diagnostics and LabWare’s real-time data reporting LIMS software should enable public health systems to react quickly in terms of quarantine guidelines, patient tracing, hotspot monitoring, and infection surveillance.
U.S. Senator Chris Coons of the State of Delaware commented: “LabWare and Tangen have brought forward an exciting new capability to deliver portable, rapid testing that also connects testing data seamlessly to state public health and CDC databases. I’m grateful for their dedication and their innovation and look forward to seeing the impact this new system can make on our nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Richard Birkmeyer, President and CEO at Tangen commented: “The COVID-19 pandemic is tragic for many families. Everyone at Tangen Biosciences has been working long hours to have our sensitive COVID-19 assay on the market. More importantly, we believe the combined COVID-19 and Flu A/B test will be a critical surveillance tool for respiratory illness management. In addition to the COVID-19 test, we are also developing a sepsis panel and an antimicrobial-resistant panel, and we are currently looking for strategic partners for both projects.”
Tangen’s COVID-19 program has been funded in part with Federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services: Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, under Contract No. 75A50120C00085.
Source: Company Press Release