Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast Dx Real-time PCR System

Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast Dx Real-time PCR System Patrick Luetdke, Director of Public Health at the Unified State Laboratories in Taylorsville, Utah discusses how the Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast Dx Real-time PCR System is used in microbiology testing and speeds their time to actionable results. [video transcript] The Unified State Laboratories in Utah is sort of a primary or core public health laboratory complex; we perform public health microbiology testing of interest and need for public heath surveillance purposes. We also include environmental testing capabilities such as water testing, soil, air testing and then interestingly we’re roughly one of the 15 public health labs in the country that do forensic toxicology testing as well. Which includes driving under the influence, testing drunk driving type testing, as well as determining the cause and matter of death for suspicious deaths for the medical examiner. Prior to having the 7500 Fast Dx we were limited with some of the much older, sort of core public health virology testing in the influenza arena. So we DFA testing which takes time, involves viral culture work, um, it’s slow. And while it’s accurate and provides a good product, it takes too long to allow us to get really actionable test results. The 7500 has allowed us to get real-time test results that are really actionable that allow us to say something to our local health departments or to our hospital communities and say this is what’s out there; and that turnaround time of course is really key for the public health labs because one of our core roles is to be the early warning laboratory or the early warning system for health care in America and that’s public health’s labs focus. So that instrument has really helped us to do that. Not only is the 7500 Fast Dx easy to use instrument, in terms of functional hands on abilities, but the data analysis is really quite smooth and seamless. The potential of the instrument to be used outside of the influenza arena which is where we focused on is also something very important. So we use it for alphavirus testing as well. And some of the other LRN laboratory response network testing. We have a much more seamless, public health delivery system when we and our public health partners are working on the same platform, the same science, the same FDA mandates. Life Technologies helped tremendously in getting all of those pieces of that puzzle together so we could see the whole picture so to speak and respond to this pandemic. To learn more, visit: