The FDA has approved a detection device from BacterioScan, a St. Louis biotech startup, which can quickly diagnose patients with urinary tract infections, according to St. Louis Public Radio.
The detection device, BacterioScan 216DX, transmits a laser through urine samples to determine whether bacteria are multiplying. If it detects growing bacteria, a patient has an infection.
BacterioScan can reduce the average time it takes to make a UTI diagnosis from two days to three hours, according to Dana Marshall, president and CEO of the startup,
"In U.S. hospitals, maybe two-thirds of the samples that get processed are urine that's tested for UTI," Ms. Marshall told St. Louis Public Radio. "Of those, about 80 percent are negative. So this test is just a fast way to remove all those negative samples from the workflow so that the skilled people can focus on known positive samples and so patients who don't have an infection can be taken off antibiotics."
The device will first be used in hospital laboratories. The startup hopes to expand its use to physician's offices and eventually harvest the technology to detect blood infections.