Bioinformatics software firm CLC bio has been awarded $2 million in EU funding as part of the $10 million Pathseek project, a clinical microbiology initiative that aims to demonstrate the use of next-generation sequencing for detecting pathogens and drug resistance directly in clinical samples. CLC’s involvement will focus on developing a user-friendly software package that will allow clinical laboratories to carry out pathogen identification, host biomarker identification, pathogen-variant characterization, and molecular epidemiology.

“Current platforms in diagnostic laboratories are limited by the amount of time required for generating a result and by the limited sequence information available for pathogens,” comments Roald Forsberg, vp of R&D at CLC. “To overcome these limitations we’re going to develop a disruptive diagnostic technological pathogen sequencing platform which utilizes our world-leading bioinformatics expertise to enable scientists to go from a patient sample to a result, in less than 48 hours.”

Pathseek involves scientists at University College London (U.K.), Erasmus Universitair Medisch Centrum Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Oxford Gene Technology (U.K.), and CLC Bio. The consortium’s initial focus will be on using next-gen sequencing to diagnose infections including HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis B and C, and influenza A. The consortium will in addition be investigating two host cell pharmacogenomics biomarkers that predict response to therapy for HCV and HIV.

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