ECBC is the US Army’s principal research and development centre for chemical and biological defence technology, engineering and field operations.
The licence allows the integration of ECBC’s Agents of Biological Organs Identification (ABOID) system into Sage-N Research’s Sorcerer proteomics platform. Currently, the ABOID system can identify 4,500 different bacteria, viruses and fungi.
“This technology enables identification of micro-organisms down to strain level in minutes, rather than hours,” said ECBC senior scientist Charles Wick. “This proves very successful for infectious disease identification and a range of other potential applications in military, medical, pharmaceutical, food and public safety areas.”
The new platform will harness the computational power of Sorcerer and mass spectrometry based proteomics to identify bacteria, viruses, fungi and other cellular material without the need for growing cultures, or having any prior knowledge about them.
