The world’s first rapid, precision-laser-sensor bacterial detection system won this year’s Silver Medical Design Excellence Award (MDEA) for diagnostic products and systems.  This is the third award for the innovative system earned this year by its maker, BacterioScan Inc. a premier in vitro lab diagnostics company.  The Medical Design Excellence Awards recognize significant advances in medical product design and engineering that improve the quality of healthcare delivery and accessibility. Announcement of the awards came yesterday during the annual MD&M East medical device event evening in New York. BacterioScan’s industrial design partner is MetaPhase (St. Louis, MO).

"The MDEA competition is a prestigious program that fosters innovation by honoring the highest calibre medical devices on the market today and those who are dedicated to their development”, said Dana Marshall, President and CEO. Adding “it was an honor to work with our industrial design partners at Metaphase.”BacterioScan’s system delivers results that reduce laboratory time-­to-­result by 95% for the vast majority of samples while reducing lab workload by more than 60%.

BacterioScan is also developing advanced technology to provide rapid detection of antibiotic-­resistant bacterial infection, reducing the time for determining optimum treatment from several days down to a few hours.  The new technology will improve, patient care, reduce the cost of effective treatment, and helps fight the emergence of bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics. BacterioScan deploys its instruments and disposables globally for clinical studies at world-class research institutions.

“This research  focuses on rapidly detecting antibiotic resistance and the precisely determining antibiotic susceptibility and optimum patient-specific drug and dose concentrations for a variety of bacterial infections,” said Marshall.  “Initial work has clearly shown that our company’s technology can reduce the time to detect resistance from over 30 hours to less than two hours; this dramatic improvement in time-to-result can reduce antibiotic development time and costs as well as speed clinical trial enrolment; supporting the global need for antibiotic stewardship.”