Amid rising concerns about a lack of testing to stop the spread of the monkeypox virus, Neelyx Labs, an independent diagnostics firm, says they are now processing monkeypox PCR tests, with a capacity of 8,000 tests per day.
Neelyx also delivers stat tests with a one-hour turnaround using the XDive ultrafast, real-time PCR instrument.
Neelyx Labs was established in 2020 to provide accurate, timely diagnosis of COVID-19 and its variants with RT-PCR testing and clinical sequencing. Since the emergence of monkeypox in the United States, Neelyx Labs has released a CDC-compliant PCR test for the virus that supports testing of dry swabs, swabs in transport media (wet swabs), lesions, and saliva.
“We have high capacity that was proven during COVID, and we’ve duplicated those logistics for monkeypox testing,” says Shyam Saladi, CEO and lead scientist at Neelyx Labs. “Healthcare facilities and public health departments need flexibility and capacity to process thousands of specimens in aggregate or to focus on smaller subsets of high-priority cases. We support this with fast turnaround of PCR test results within 20 minutes through existing EMR portals.”
Neelyx Labs partners with OnsiteGene, a San Diego-based biotechnology company supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnosis (RADx) program, to deploy the XDive PCR machine. XDive can complete 40 cycles of real-time PCR testing in as little as five minutes, while delivering fully automated sample-to-answer qPCR testing, nested PCR, or PCR with automated pre-amplification.
“XDive pushes the boundary of qPCR testing with order-of-magnitude improvements in run time and limit of detection,” says Thomas Gong, president of OnsiteGene. “This is a breakthrough for many infectious disease applications that require fast turnaround and extreme sensitivity.”
Neelyx Labs follows all state and federal health guidelines and provides quick communication to public health officials to track and mitigate the spread of pathogens.
