Profile of GenMark’s ePlex® blood culture identification fungal pathogen panel

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Fungemia presents high morbi-mortality and thus rapid microbiological diagnosis may contribute to appropriate patient management. In the last decade, kits based on molecular technologies have become available and health care institutes are increasingly facing critical investment choices. Although all these tools aim to achieve rapid fungal detection and species identification, they display different inherent characteristics.

Areas covered: Considering technologies allowing detection and identification of fungal species in a sepsis context, the market proposes either tests on positive blood culture or tests on patient’s whole blood. In this review, the authors describe and compare the ePlex® Blood Culture Identification Fungal Pathogen (BCID-FP) test, a fully automated one-step single-use cartridge assay that has been designed to detect identify frequent or rare but emerging, fungal species, from positive blood culture. A comparison with the competing kits is provided.

Expert commentaries: The ePlex BCID-FP test provides a diversified and rather relevant panel. Its easy-to-use cartridges allow flexible use around the clock. Nevertheless, prospective clinical studies assessing the time-to-result benefit on antifungal stewardship and on hospital length of stay are not available yet. New tools aim to benefit clinicians and patients, but they should be accompanied by supervision of result interpretation and adaptation of antifungal stewardship.

KEYWORDS:

• Fungemia
• candidemia
• invasive fungal infection
• diagnosis
• molecular diagnostic
• blood culture
• PCR
• antifungal stewardship

Acknowledgments

We thank Pr Max Maurin and Dr Yvan Caspar from the Bacteriology laboratory of the Grenoble-Alpes Hospital for the collaboration on the different GenMark ePlex protocols. The authors are grateful to Lisa Filippone, Adam Thornberg and Philippe Stracchi from GenMark for providing technical information on the BCID-FP and permission for Figure 2 reprint. Tradutour for English proofreading and editing.

Declaration of Interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose. Writing assistance was utilised in the preparation of this manuscript, it was carried out by Tradtour. GenMark provided a scientific accuracy review at the request of the journal editor.

Additional information

Funding

The authors lab received GenMark’s commercial support for the testing of BCID-FP cartridges (free cartridges were sent for testing).