Singapore, April 30, 2009: Veredus Laboratories, a privately held, life sciences company that develops, commercializes and manufactures diagnostic tools that are marketed worldwide announced that the current version of VereFlu is able to detect, from a sequence perspective, the variant strain of H1N1 (swine flu) that is responsible for the Flu outbreak in Mexico and which has caused concern on a global scale.

 

The VereID Biosystem and VereFlu launched in 2008, built on the STMicroelectronics lab-on-chip platform, is the market’s first test which has integrated two powerful molecular biological applications, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and a microarray, onto a Lab-on-Chip platform. VereFlu can identify and differentiate human strains of Influenza A (H1, H3, H5, H7, H9) and B viruses, including the Avian Flu strain H5N1, as well as the current Swine Flu H1N1, all in a single test.

 

VereFlu is a portable lab-on-chip application for rapid detection of all major influenza types at the point of need. Unlike existing diagnostic methods, VereFlu is a breakthrough molecular diagnostic test that can detect infection with high accuracy and sensitivity, within two hours, providing genetic information on the infection that traditionally could take days to weeks to learn. With its high level of automation, users outside the traditional lab environment can easily perform the tests at the point of need.

 

“Within a few days of learning of this new mutation, we have updated our flu panel to include the detection of the new variant strain of H1N1 and expect to have these chips available shortly. Once we’ve verified the efficacy of the tests on human samples over the next few weeks, we expect to be able to deliver a fast, reliable surveillance system that can be deployed globally to help monitor the current influenza situation,” said Dr Rosemary Tan, chief executive officer of Veredus.