The sooner a hospital lab can identify the cause of a patient's infection, the faster that patient can be put on the right antibiotics. Today, microbiologists often try to grow the infectious agent in the lab and run various tests to identify it. This can take a few days, and some organisms, including Candida, grow more slowly than others. Tests based on amplifying genetic material are considerably faster, but require complicated processing equipment. Tests that use fluorescent labels to light up a target are also faster, but samples like blood are too cloudy for the light to pass through.
T2 Biosystems's technology is based on work carried out by researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital on tailoring iron-oxide nanoparticles to bind to specific biomarkers, and then using a miniature magnetic system to detect the binding. The detector is essentially a tiny, simplified version of a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system. Such systems usually require very large, expensive magnets, whereas T2 Biosystems's device uses a magnetic detector about the size of a penny.
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