"Genomics promise faster diagnosis of critical infections"

At the plenary session, Innovative Diagnosis, held as part of EmTech India 2010 conference here today, Dr BV Ravikumar, MD, Xcyton Diagnostics, Bangalore talked about the importance of genomics for critical care.

Dr Ravikumar is of the opinion that with the advancement of human genomics, the diagnostics has changed rapidly. He said that critical infection has high mortality rate where a patient dies in 72 to 90 hours. The conventional methods take at last five to six days for the diagnosis. The challenge of diagnosing critical infections are that it should be diagnosed in 24 hours to save the patient’s life.

As infections are often localized, and there would not be any trace of infections in blood or serum, the early diagnosis is difficult. In case of bacterial and fungal infection, using the conventional diagnostics methods take 72 to 96 hours to identify the pathogen. While, diagnosis of viral infection goes up to seven days. Also, the body takes minimum five days to develop the antibodies against the pathogen.

This situation warrants a diagnosis method, which identifies pathogens within 24 hours to save lives. To address this, Xcyton Diagstics has developed a Syndrome Evaluation System, which the company calls as a paradigm shift in this field. In this system, all the genes necessary are incorporated in a chip and analyzed.

The system promises simultaneous detection of pathogens. The advantage of the system is, it takes only seven hours for the detection of critical infections, he said. The system does not not use any fluorescent gels and the end result generated by the system can be read by naked eyes.

He further said that another advantage of the system is that it can be used in district level hospitals. As of now the service has been given to some selected hospitals in the Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

The second edition of the EmTech India 2010, organized by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in association with the India edition of Cyber Media's Technology Review, was inaugurated today in Bangalore. The first edition of this premier event happened in New Delhi last year. This is the second edition of EmTech conference being held out side the MIT campus, US.