The US Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent to Great Basin Inc, Salt Lake City, for the company’s compositions for signal amplification. The underlying technology is designed to improve assay sensitivity, and makes it possible to detect low levels of pathogens directly from such clinical specimens as blood, lung aspirates, stool, swabs, and urine.

The technology can be utilized with all potential diagnostic targets, including nucleic acids and proteins. The patent protects development of sensitive immunoassay-based testing with expanded targets on the Great Basin testing system.

“Great Basin is committed to protecting our intellectual assets and innovations, and providing distinctive diagnostic solutions to our customers,” says Ryan Aston, cofounder and CEO of Great Basin. “With this patent, directed to our proprietary compositions for diagnostic assays, we further protect our ability to deliver to customers the cost, ease-of-use, and versatility they need in a molecular diagnostic system.”

The amplification and detection compositions used by Great Basin, termed “Amped,” enables the direct detection of pathogens present in clinical samples without requiring polymerase chain reaction-based target amplification, and is no longer limited to testing only for nucleic acids. The expanded patent further secures the intellectual property behind Great Basin’s advanced molecular diagnostics technology. Great Basin now has five issued patents in the United States and Europe.

For more information, visit Great Basin Scientific.