NEW YORK – BioMérieux announced Wednesday the CE marking of three immunoassay to detect dengue virus infections. The fully automated assays run on the firm's Vidas systems.
The Vidas Dengue NS1 Ag assay detects dengue virus antigen, while the Anti-Dengue IgM and Anti-Dengue IgG detect patient antibodies to the virus.
A mosquito-borne infection, dengue affects up to 400 million people each year. "Presenting in different forms, from mild to life-threatening, a dengue diagnosis and optimal patient management both rely on rapid and reliable diagnostics," said Mark Miller, executive vice president and chief medical officer at BioMérieux.
The Vidas Dengue assays provide reliable results with improved quality compared to the existing manual methods, the firm noted, and the test process is fully automated from sample identification to the result report.
Further, the Vidas Dengue solution is "cost-effective and suitable for low- and middle-income countries where Vidas is widely available," said Pierre Boulud, BioMérieux's chief operating officer of clinical operations. "It broadens our immunoassay offer against vector borne-diseases that will be further extended to chikungunya," he added.