Genpax, a life science startup focused on transforming healthcare in detecting, tracing, and mitigating the spread of bacterial pathogens, has been announced as a winner by the IET for their 2023 Excellence and Innovation Awards. The Awards celebrate the most pioneering engineering and technology innovations across 16 sectors, from energy and sustainability to manufacturing and healthcare. Chosen by a panel of expert judges, Genpax won the Health Technology award for their re

NEW YORK – Bioinformatics company Genpax estimates that healthcare systems can save considerable money while preventing infection outbreaks through microbial whole-genome sequencing. In a study published earlier this month in Microbial Genetics, the London-based company calculated that implementing a WGS surveillance strategy could prevent some 74,000 infections annually in England, saving the National Health Service approximately £480 million ($604.5 million) per year, amoun

Download the full paper below: Abstract Bacterial healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a substantial source of global morbidity and mortality. The estimated cost associated with HAIs ranges from $35 to $45 billion in the USA alone. The costs and accessibility of whole genome sequencing (WGS) of bacteria and the lack of sufficiently accurate, high-resolution, scalable and accessible analysis for strain identification are being addressed. Thus, it is timely to determine

A recent economic modelling paper by Genpax, published in Microbial Genomics, concludes that in England, the National Health Service (NHS) could save close to £0.5bn and prevent 1200 avoidable deaths, and the US health system over $3bn and 4,800 deaths by implementing whole genome sequencing (WGS) as a tool to control bacterial healthcare-associated infections. Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a huge economic burden to global healthcare systems. They currently cos

Presented by Rebecca Ji Bengtsson at ASM Microbe in Houston, Texas 2023 Download the high-resolution pdf below: Supplementary Information

Presented by Ramiro Morales-Hojas at ASM Microbe in Houston, Texas 2023 Download high-resolution pdf below: Supplementary Information

Presented by John Fox at ASM Microbe in Houston, Texas 2024 Bacterial HAIs are a substantial source of global morbidity and mortality, resulting in increased length of hospital stay and high healthcare costs. At Genpax, we're often asked what the benefit of adopting a WGS led intervention strategy could have on hospitals systems, so we developed at thorough model to work it out. Our findings will be presented at the forthcoming ASM Microbe 23 meeting in Houston in June. If y

Presented by James Littlefair at ECCMID in Copenhagen, 2023 Download high-resolution pdf below: At ECCMID 2023 in Copenhagen, we displayed some of the findings regarding our near-zero error capabilities generated from our platform which will be launched commercially this summer. Calling Zero: A new foundation for diagnostic bacterial genomics James C. Littlefair, Benedict J. Uttley, Dan G. Frampton, Gareth M. Linsmith, John F. Peden, & Nigel J. Saunders Reference ECCMID

The same features of the Genpax analysis that mean that all strains of a species can be compared in one location with a common analysis resource (as opposed to others, such as those that must use multiple reference genomes or where resolution reduces with increasing numbers and diversity of strains), and its open scalability means it will generate equally comparable and integratable findings from information generated and submitted from different laboratories. This is enabled

Genpax analysis was created for the real-world problem from the bottom-up with scalability as an essential requirement. Scalability is a constraint for existing solutions, the three main reasons being: • The statistical nature of relationship determinations that are impossible to scale (they are ‘NP-hard’ problems) • The loss of resolution with increasing diversity and number of compared strains with common genome SNP • Data generated with more than one reference genome when

When strains are evolving at 1 to 10 nucleotides per year per genome, it is important to address as much of the genome sequence information as possible within the limits of what can be achieved accurately. This cannot be 100% of the genome with current sequencing technologies. For example, regions that are repeatedly present in the genome either identically or with minor variations (for example the ribosomal RNA sequences) are inherently difficult to address. Exactly how much

Download high-resolution pdf below: A Novel Multi-Scale Outbreak Detection and Strain Identification Capability for Genome Sequence-Based Infection Control: An MRSA Example. J. C. Littlefair, B. Uttley, D. Frampton, J. F. Peden, N. J. Saunders The exclusion (as well as inclusion) of strains is vital for outbreak investigation and infection prevention and control of healthcare-associated infection, for both health resource management and patient-care. Current genome-sequence b

It is repeatedly stated that we face a global challenge of antimicrobial resistance and catastrophic health and economic impacts, and that this is the product of misuse, abuse, and essentially over-use of antibiotics. It is hard to argue, and I would not wish to, that this is at least partly the case, but it is both dangerous and misleading to present this as the whole of the explanation. What we are seeing is an inevitable consequence of many pressures and their inevitable e

At one level, the numbers look good, but if you look again, maybe not. Once upon a time, TB started out as something else, probably some environmental predecessor that lived in watery or other environments, perhaps starting out in another animal, but eventually, it got to humans. There was a ‘patient zero’ for TB, just as there is for all new and emergent pathogens, and for TB, it is guessed that this happened around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. There is evidence that it has be

As Sun Tzu famously said: ‘know your enemy’, or more correctly: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’ This is true not only for human conflict but in what is probably the greatest and longest running battle the human race has ever engaged in: that between humans and their pathogens. Ultimately, COVID-19, our current enemy of focus, might kill 1%, but hopefully, many fewer now that there is a vaccine and better treatments

Life is full of initially hidden and unintended impacts and consequences; for something as huge and pervasive as COVID, no doubt they will be many and varied: some good, some bad, some just resulting in different. The global infrastructural leadership of the UK in the area of genomics, underpinned by the public and charitable contributions of the UK Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust, has been critical in surveillance, variant detection, and now screening. By February 2