Next Gen Diagnostics CEO Paul Rhodes Announces That Dr. Linoj Samuel Has Joined NGD’s Scientific Advisory Board
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., June 7, 2024 (Newswire.com) - Next Gen Diagnostics announces that Dr. Linoj Samuel, Division Head of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory for Henry Ford Health in Detroit Michigan, has joined NGD’s Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Samuel, a national leader in defining best practices for integration of clinical microbiology results to optimally benefit patient care and hospital function, is also the current Chair of the American Society for Microbiology Clinical Microbiology and Public Health Committee.
“For years Linoj has been a valued partner in the development of clinical technologies, and it is a pleasure to welcome him to NGD’s Scientific Advisory Board,” said Dr. Paul A. Rhodes, NGD’s founder and CEO. “As we bring automated WGS and bioinformatic results into clinical evaluation and use, Linoj’s deeply considered and experience-informed insights and guidance into what is needed and what is possible will be uniquely valuable.”
NGD has developed some of the most accurate systems for the determination of resistance in Gram negative bacteria from WGS, including resistance to the clinically important drug cefepime in E. coli, with accuracy higher than that of the in vitro methods that comprise the current standard of care as recently validated by Humphries et al in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology (1). NGD has also recently, in partnership with Vanderbilt (2), demonstrated the use of WGS to detect transmission in a neonatal intensive care ward, adding to the growing literature confirming that prospective WGS is a powerful tool to detect transmission and assist infection control teams in curtailing it.
“It is increasingly clear that WGS is going to be central to clinical infectious disease practice as well as to hospital infection prevention, and NGD is one of the leaders of this transformation,” said Dr. Samuel. “I welcome the opportunity to contribute clinical and operational perspective and experience to NGD’s development of services that leverage the automation of sequencing and bioinformatics to enable practical applications of bacterial WGS in a hospital setting.”
1 Humphries et al, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 2023
2 Gaston et al, ASM Microbe Abstract 2024
About Next Gen Diagnostics
NGD, founded by Dr. Paul A. Rhodes along with Sanger Institute group leaders in Cambridge, has built and validated world-leading automation of pathogen bioinformatics enabling high throughput low cost clinical use of WGS. In addition, NGD holds the exclusive rights to a unique microfluidic sample preparation system for clinical and commercial applications of pathogen WGS. NGD offers a high volume turn-key sequencing services to enable detection of transmission in hospitals, and is working with leading collaborators in the US, Europe and Israel to be among the first to bring WGS-based regulated diagnostics to patient care. NGD is based in the US, with subsidiaries based in Cambridge, UK and in Israel.
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Source: Next Gen Diagnostics