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Up to 35 French hospitals poised to adopt FastFinder for COVID testing

Thomas Beuls | Press Release | 27/08/2020

Paris, France | Brussels, Belgium | August 27, 2020 | The centralized hospital procurement group UniHA and UgenTec have agreed on a FastFinder PCR software purchase agreement for national COVID testing. Under the agreement, up to 35 hospital labs can now adopt FastFinder Analysis for streamlined, automated result analysis and reporting.

UniHA, the cross-hospital purchasing department (Union des Hôpitaux pour les Achats) will offer FastFinder as part of its molecular biology portfolio to up to 35 private and public hospitals and molecular diagnostic laboratories across France.

An agreement across all participating diagnostic labs

UgenTec and the French purchasing group UniHA today announced the agreement on terms of purchasing for 35 private and public laboratories. Under the agreement, laboratories will be able to tap into UgenTec FastFinder Analysis to scale their testing of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens.

UniHA is a French organization that focuses on group purchasing agreements with vendors. It represents 35 public and private laboratories and is managing the French nationwide effort to collectively purchase SARS-CoV-2 related products.

FastFinder for national COVID screening as well as other diagnostic testing

UgenTec’s FastFinder platform is a workflow and data analysis suite designed to support molecular laboratories’ scalability, standardization, traceability and compliance efforts. FastFinder software will support the laboratories testing SARS-CoV-2 today, but also support their open PCR workflows for other pathogens in the future. In this purchasing agreement, FastFinder will support SARS-CoV-2 PCR assays developed by Biomérieux, BGI Genomics & Thermo Fisher Scientific across PCR devices such as Roche LightCycler, BioRad CFX, QuantStudio 5 as well as other popular real-time PCR hardware.

We are proud of our efforts to offer laboratories solutions that help them tackle the pandemic, cost-efficiently” said Thierry Blanchard, head of digital health at UniHA. “FastFinder is the perfect solution for labs looking to standardize and automate the data analysis and reporting loop of their workflows.”

CHU Lyon immediately recognized the challenge UgenTec is solving. With thousands of samples being processed on open PCR platforms, a lot of work was being put into data analysis.” said Dr. Alexandre Gaymard, molecular biologist at CHU Lyon. “In analysis scale up, FastFinder is more efficient than manual analysis and allows for full standardization of data analysis.

This is an exciting partnership. Within this agreement, already 10 laboratories have signed up to implement FastFinder for their COVID-19 testing.” said Steven Verhoeven, CEO at UgenTec. “Laboratories are facing numerous challenges in scaling up their testing capacity to be ready for a new wave. With FastFinder, we can automate data management and interpretation tasks, leaving more time for other activities in the lab .”

Initial reactions from participating laboratories

Before FastFinder an analysis of 100 samples would take over 30 minutes of manual curve interpretation and then manually entering the data in our LIS. Today with FastFinder implemented in our COVID real-time PCR platform, this 30 minutes are reduced to 15 seconds and this in a 100% standardized way. As a cherry on the cake the data is transferred automatically so also on this end no human error can be detected.”
CHU Amiens | Dr. Catherine François


FastFinder’s automated analysis COVID pipeline works like a charm. Once implemented, we can automatically submit all results that are within our cutoff criteria to the LIMS. The AI ensures no creeping curves or drifting curves are passed through accidentally
CHU Poitiers | Prof. Dr. Nicolas Leveque


FastFinder is our sample-to-result software on top of open PCR devices. During the training of my colleagues, I was actually analyzing 2 runs myself and checking manually the results into our LIS which took me roughly 40 minutes. I decided to run the same runs against FastFinder – and it took me only a few minutes. This will drastically standardize our results as well as save valuable time in the laboratory, especially the automatic transfer of the analyzed results into our LIS.”
CHRU Strasbourg | Dr. Morgane Solis

National initiatives

National initiatives standardize on UgenTec's FastFinder for COVID data analysis and reporting. UgenTec recently announced extending the comprehensive COVID initiative at the national level in Belgium. Now, French diagnostic labs are adopting the platform in a concerted effort. Several other national initiatives have been brought up and running in the past months, benefiting not just from FastFinder Analysis for result standardization and automation (minimizing molecular biologist review time) but also facilitating cross-lab reporting and QC, epidemiology level reporting, and dashboards on proficiency testing initiatives, with FastFinder Insights - the lab intelligence module of the FastFinder platform.

 

Contact
UgenTec NV, Belgium
Thomas Beuls
Thomas.beuls@ugentec.com

UgenTec Inc, Cambridge MA, USA
Steven Van Vooren
Steven.VanVooren@ugentec.com

Info@ugentec.com

About UgenTec
UgenTec is a molecular laboratory software provider servicing molecular labs, assay and instrument providers globally across applications in Clinical Molecular Diagnostics, Veterinary health, Crop Science, Breeding and Seed Health. UgenTec is headquartered in Hasselt, Belgium with offices in Boston, MA and its FastFinder platform has a global installed base of over 100 molecular labs and partnerships with leading molecular diagnostics vendors.

FastFinder is a modular, clinical grade Software as a Service platform using AI methods allowing labs of all sizes to standardize and automate their molecular workflows. FastFinder’s modules include Analysis, Insights, Genotyper and Workflow.

Visit http://www.ugentec.com/ for more information.

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