Bacteriology

AlphaOmega is proud to present the first diagnostic product of their own brand:
EbSA^(*) the only ESBL Screening Agar that fulfils the requirements of the Dutch guideline for detection of ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae and the guideline of the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST).

EbSA was developed at the VU University Medical Center (Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
This agar has a very good specificity, with still a 100% sensitivity. A study on 208 clinical isolates showed that the specificity was 85% compared to 57% specificity of another commercial ESBL agar. When used to detect ESBL-producing bacteria directly in 100 clinical specimen the specificity was even 96% !
Until now ESBL Screening agars had a low specificity due to the growth of isolates of species with inducible AmpC beta-lactamases.

In addition, when combining EbSA and hyplex^® ESBL ID a rapid, effective, economical and easy to use method for ESBL detection and identification (without further testing) is available now, including CTX-M ESBLs, which are the most prevalent ESBLs worldwide.
This low cost test combination provides a useful early therapeutic guidance with rapid identification of ESBL-positive isolates.

hyplex^® ESBL ID, directly performed on clinical specimen, gives a definite result for CTX-M positive samples in 3-4 hours.

AlphaOmega has signed a licence agreement with the VU University Medical Center (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) to produce and commercialise EbSA plates.

^(*) patent pending

References:
N. al Naiemi et al., Poster P50, Voorjaarsvergadering NVMM, Papendal 2008
N. al Naiemi et al., Poster P871, 18th ECCMID, Barcelona 2008