Tangen Biosciences has entered into an exclusive partnership with LabWare, which will see Tangen’s GeneSpark™ COVID-19 testing device included in 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 significantly 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.

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.