BANGALORE, INDIA: At the Plenary Session, Innovative Diagnosis, held as part of EmTech 2010 here today, Dr. BV Ravikumar, MD, Xcyton Diagstics talked about the importance of Genomics for Critical Care.

Ravikumar said that critical infection has high mortality rate where a patient dies in 72 to 90 hours. The conventional methods take at east 5 to 6 days for the diagnostics. The challenge of diagnosing critical infections are that it should be diagnosed in 24 hours to save the patient’s life.
 
As infections are often localized, and there would not be any trace of infections in blood or serum, it is difficult to diagnose the infection. In case of bacterial and fungal infection, using the conventional diagnostics methods take 72 to 96 hours to identify the pathogen. In case of viral infection it goes up to seven days. Also the body takes five days to develop the antibodies against the pathogen.
 
This situation warrants a diagnostic method which identifies pathogens within 24 hours to save lives. To address this, Xcyton Diagstics has developed Syndrome Evaluation system, which the company calls as a paradigm shift. In this system, all the genes necessary are incorporated in a chip and analysed.
 
The system promises simultaneous detection of pathogens. The advantage of the system is, it takes only 7 ours for detection, he said. And the end result can be read by naked eyes.
 
It can be used in district level hospitals. The service has been given in hospitals in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.