Inverness Medical to Distribute Detect-Ready™ MRSA Assay

Molecular Detection Inc. (MDI), a company developing Detect-Ready™ assays designed to increase the speed and accuracy of infectious disease diagnosis, and Inverness Medical Deutschland GmbH have entered into an exclusive distribution agreement for MDI's Detect-Ready MRSA assay in the key European markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The companies also announced that the Detect-Ready MRSA assay is available now to customers in these countries.

The Detect-Ready MRSA kit is a qualitative real time PCR diagnostic test for the direct detection of MRSA nasal colonization to aid in the prevention and control of MRSA infections in hospitals and other health care settings.

The proprietary technology in the Detect-Ready kits provides a unique differential diagnosis engine that produces highly accurate results, minimizing the false positives and false negatives experienced with other diagnostic screening kits. Samples for testing are simple to obtain using nasal swabs and the assay's ready-to-use pre-mixed reagents require only the addition of patient sample to run the test, which provides results in less than three hours.

Unlike other testing products that require special handling, Detect-Ready kits are off-the-shelf room temperature-stabilized and require no refrigeration. Detect-Ready kits are compatible with multiple rt-PCR platforms currently found in clinical laboratories, including the Roche LightCycler®, Qiagen Rotor-Gene® and Cepheid SmartCycler®. This flexibility to leverage existing infrastructure and equipment to run Detect-Ready assays eliminates the need for additional hospital capital investment.

The Detect-Ready MRSA assay kit has received CE mark certification for sales in the European Union.