QIAGEN Adds dPCR Platform QIAcuity to Growing Portfolio of COVID-19 Testing Solutions for Wastewater and Mutation Testing

QIAGEN today announced the addition of kits for wastewater testing to its growing portfolio of COVID-19 products. The use of dPCR in the worldwide surveillance of COVID-19 is an additional step towards making digital PCR (dPCR) an affordable and standard instrument for a host of applications in molecular-testing laboratories worldwide.

The new kits are designed for use on the uniquely fast and easy-to-use series of QIAcuity instruments based on digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR) technology. QIAcuity precisely quantifies even minimal quantities of DNA and RNA in research tests for viruses, bacteria or genetic disorders, including the rarest of cancer mutations.

The precision of QIAcuity provides a valuable tool for use in testing wastewater for SARS-CoV-2. The application offers a cost-effective way to survey transmission dynamics of entire communities, avoiding the biases of other epidemiological indicators like deaths as a proportion of known cases or of the total population.

"In a trial run with the new high-throughput QIAcuity Eight, we were able to successfully detect new variants of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater samples," said Dr. Franz Durandet, President of I.A.G.E. in Montpellier, France. "Our tests have proven that this fast and scalable technology from QIAGEN can provide a valuable addition to our environmental biological testing services, which we will offer to our clients in the near future."

COVID-19 surveillance through wastewater testing allows public authorities to collect data from broad sweeps of the population, including people who do not feature in public-health statistics because they lack access to healthcare. Potentially, surveillance testing can reveal infection and mutation dynamics earlier than diagnostic testing, providing public-health officials with near-real-time information on disease prevalence.

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