The study, commissioned by the UK Department of Health, will look at the detection of colonization by MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in UK patients based at NHS Trusts in Birmingham and Solihul.
The company hopes to recruit approximately 10,000 patients to be tested on GeneOhm’s IDI-MRSA rapid, molecular-based screening assay for identification of MRSA directly from patient specimens. The IDI-MRSA assay is currently in use at numerous leading institutions in the UK, Europe and North America.
Medical staff screening patients for MRSA using traditional culture methods often have to wait 48 hours or more for results. This delay means that patients carrying MRSA are not identified until two to three days after they are in a ward. GeneOhm says the IDI-MRSA assay system can detect MRSA in less than two hours directly from the patient specimen.
MRSA is a drug-resistant form of the pathogen S. aureus, which is a major cause of infection in both healthcare and community settings. MRSA infections have been shown to cause substantial illness and longer hospital stays. Having definitive results for MRSA in hours instead of days allows proper treatment to begin almost immediately, significantly improving outcomes while enabling institutions to better control overall costs of infections.