Day Zero Diagnostics Announces the Launch of Day Zero Lab Services
Providing Whole Genome Sequencing Based Services for High Impact Clinical Decisions
Boston—April 11, 2022—Day Zero Diagnostics, Inc., an infectious disease diagnostics company using genome sequencing and machine learning to combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, today announced the launch of Day Zero Lab Services focused on providing hospitals with services focused on whole-genome sequencing-based assays.
As part of its offerings, the Day Zero CLIA-certified lab offers a suite of services focused on healthcare-associated infection (HAI) outbreaks. Particularly, epiXact®, a rapid, 2-day turnaround service based on whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and a proprietary bioinformatics pipeline. “HAIs, particularly those caused by multi-drug resistant organisms, are a significant cause of illness and death in the United States.” said Nicole Billings, PhD, Director of Lab Services at Day Zero, “At any given time, 1 in every 31 hospital patients has an HAI. Tens of thousands of patients lose their lives from HAIs each year, and these infections impose billions of dollars in excess costs annually.”
A recent case report in Clinical Infectious Diseases describes how epiXact helped a large, academic hospital identify the source of a persistent, repeated appearance of Burkholderia cepacia (B.cepacia) complex infections in cardiothoracic intensive care unit (CTICU) patients despite a series of interventions taken over months. After failing to identify the source of these infections, the hospital turned to Day Zero Diagnostics to perform an epiXact HAI investigation to get definitive insight into the cause of these transmissions.
“Using a whole-genome SNP-based approach provides the highest resolution possible to compare samples, down to a nucleotide level, which in turn, provides extremely high confidence in the ability to confirm or rule out transmission of pathogens,” said Mohamad Sater, PhD, Director of Computational Biology at Day Zero Diagnostics. “As part of our service, we bank all the samples sent to us by our clients, which allows us to compare new samples to previous ones we analyzed and indicate whether there is a persistent ongoing outbreak.”
In addition to the CLIA-validated, epiXact service, the Day Zero Lab also offers a number of research use only services like epiXact® PRO which is supported by a world-class team of scientists and several new WGS-based offerings that leverage the technologies developed at Day Zero Diagnostics are expected to launch later this year.
About Us
Day Zero Diagnostics, Inc., based in Boston, is pioneering a new class of infectious disease diagnostics using whole-genome sequencing and machine learning to revolutionize how the world fights the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. The company’s mission is to change the way infectious diseases are diagnosed and treated by rapidly identifying both the species and the antibiotic resistance profile of severe infections without the need for a culture. Day Zero also offers various WGS-based lab services, leveraging its proprietary technologies and highly curated databases of pathogens for managing healthcare-associated infection outbreaks and making high-impact clinical decisions. Day Zero Diagnostics was founded in 2016 by a team of clinicians and scientists from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. The company has been recognized as a leading innovator by CARB-X, UCSF Health, American Association of Clinical Chemistry, MedTech Innovator, TedMed Hive, Xconomy, HealthTech Arkansas, and MassChallenge HealthTech. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.